THE GUIDE TO NATURE 



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About. Bugs. 



BY J. R. DE LA TORRE BUENO, 

 WHITE PLAINS, N. Y. 



In England, the name "Bug" is never 

 uttered in polite society. It has only one 

 meaning, and polite people are presuma- 

 bly totally unfamiliar with that for which 



THEY REAM V ARE BUGS. 



it stands. In this fair land of ours, how- 

 ever, this term is applied indiscriminately 

 and erroneously to any beasty with a 

 number of legs, from a fly to a thousand 

 legs although strictly it applies only to 

 the true bugs, about which alone speak. 

 An English entomologist, G. W. Kir- 

 kaldy, has sought the origin of this 

 name in the Cymry, or Welsh, and the 

 Gaelic of olden days. According to 

 his conclusions, the Welsh "bwg" 

 (pronounced boog), means a spirit or 

 ghost, one that walks in the night, 

 whence our "bogey" which we in- 

 terpret now as a fearsome thing, 

 although it originally meant a spirit. 

 So, also, that passage in the fa- 

 mous '"Bug" Bible, where it is written 

 ^'He shall not fear the arrow by day nor 

 the bugge by night" and which now 

 reads "terror by night," means, in fact, 

 the spirit or ghost. So it is easy to see 

 how an ignorant people being troubled 



by night by something they did not see, 

 dubbed it "bugge" or ghost. 



Now and then one reads an item in 

 some magazine or newspaper about the 

 finding of bed-bugs, chinches, "mahog- 

 any flats," or "lovely strangers" under 

 the bark of logs. Of course, this bit of 

 newspaper science has led many to the 

 entirely erroneous belief that the vermin 

 are really wild things, which, coming 

 into civilization, are quickly corrupted 

 by it, just like any other savages. This 

 is not the case however, for the pest has 

 been a companion of man for ages, and, 

 in consequence of its parasitic habits, has 

 lost its wings, which are now represented 

 only by little scales. It has learnt to 

 know man and his ways, and in the long 

 course of time, has developed a perfectly 

 uncanny aptitude for circumventing him 

 and his schemes for its destruction. But 

 why spread myself out on this topic? 

 Those who have been so unfortunate as 

 to be its victims will not care to be 

 reminded of their sufferings, while those 

 in blissful ignorance are best left so. 



Of course, there is some foundation 

 for the belief that they are to be found 

 in l<»gs. There are some flat, brownish 

 bugs about the right size to be mistaken 

 for the others whose abode is under the 

 loose bark of dead or dying trees. But, ex- 

 cept in the young stages, these have wings, 

 save one kind that lives under the scaly 

 bark of pine trees, which sometimes is 

 found wingless, at others fully winged, 

 and in all degrees of wingedness in be- 

 tween. These are known to entomolo- 

 gists as Aradis, or, as Comstock calls 

 them, flat bugs. In their favorite haunts 

 they can be found at all seasons of the 

 year. Their glistening white eggs are 

 elliptical in shape and are deposited in 

 clusters on the inner side of the bark, but 

 the bugs themselves generally cling to 



