610 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



waste. She invites a guest with a special appetite for every morsel 

 guests furnished with teeth to rend, nip, and gnaw, claws to tear, au- 

 gers and chisels to bore and gouge, saws, drills, punches, and suction- 

 tubes that no fragment of the feast shall be left on the unswept 

 tables. 



There are guests of every shape, size, and description, alike only in 

 the one particular of being normally hungry. Like the sitters-down 

 at a public dinner, they all seem to have been saving up appetite for 

 the occasion. Some there are, indeed, of such omnivorous tastes that 

 we would be quite willing to have them left out from the general in- 

 vitation. But that is not Dame Nature's way. Every crumb must 

 be eaten ; and we know little of her facility of invention if we im- 

 agine that she can not find a tooth for every hard morsel. She is 

 ready for any such emergency, and you will be bound to find some 

 queer creature gnawing away at the indigestible fragment with as 

 much zest as if it were a dish fit for a king. 



Let us take a sly glance in at Nature's kitchen and watch her 

 guests at their meal. "VVe shall not call it breakfast, dinner, supper, or 

 lunch, for there is no such formal division. It is a whole-day feast, 

 and a whole-night feast, too, for that matter. The tables are always 

 spread, the guests always hungry ; they crowd in from high-ways and 

 by-ways ; always one ready to take up every vacant knife, fork, and 

 spoon ; or to plunge in with fingers, teeth, and claws, in the true primi- 

 tive fashion. 



Nature does her cooking by sunlight. The great, glaring sun is 

 her cook-stove, and by its aid she concocts, from such materials as 

 water, carbonic acid, and ammonia, various palatable dishes, such as 

 sugar, bread, fruits, greens, and a host of similar delicacies. 



" There is your dinner," she says, " make yourselves at home." 

 And so they do, without waiting to hear the dinner-bell ; rich and 

 poor, high and low ; the dainty epicureans confining themselves to the 

 fruits and seeds ; others feasting on the green leaves and the lush 

 grasses. But these are only the nobility, those who sit above the salt. 

 The commonalty are more greedy and less particular. They bore in 

 and saw in and dig in. Leaf and flower and fruit, branch and stem 

 and root, each has its epicures. Some take a mean advantage by lay- 

 ing their eggs in the heart of rosy apple or luscious pear, so that 

 their babes may revel in a perfect mountain of provender. There 

 they lie, odd little white worms, like the chap who wished that Lake 

 Superior was all ice-cream, and he plunged into its midst and con- 

 demned to eat his way out. 



It has been no trifling task to lift that lofty tree or that broad 

 field of waving grain up out of the lifeless world, and Nature is 

 bound to make it pay its full duty to the world of life before it drops 

 back again. It is her business to set going all the variety and abun- 

 dance of life possible, and tree, grass, and grain must furnish food for 



