Travers. — The Bird as the Labourer of Man. 5 



wax, honey, lac, cochineal, and the gall-nut. Some hold an 

 important place in the Pharmacopoeia, some are eaten by 

 various tribes of men, and multitudes furnish food to the 

 beasts of the earth and to the birds of the air, to the reptile 

 tribes, to the fishes, and to the moi*e powerful of their own 

 class. 



For the purposes of this paper, however, it is only neces- 

 sary to divide the whole class into those which are and those 

 which are not injurious to man. Unfortunately, the greater 

 number falls under the first of these distinctions, and accord- 

 ingly we find that Kirby and Spence, in their charming "In- 

 troduction to Entomology," devote no less than five entire 

 epistles to the injuries we sustain from insects, whilst two 

 only are sufficient to describe the benefits they yield. The 

 former contain an appalling array; the injuries done to us in 

 our field crops, in our gardens, in our orchards, in our woods 

 and forests, not to mention those which attack our live-stock 

 •or our persons, are indeed well calculated to impress us with 

 the truth of the Oriental proverb that " the smallest enemy is 

 not to be despised." 



In relation to the numbers of insects alike in tropical and 

 sub-arctic areas, I venture to make the following quotations : 

 Michelet, speaking of tropical insects, says, " Ln these cli- 

 mates the insect is the greatest curse. Insects everywhere 

 and in everything; they possess an infinity of means for 

 attacking us ; they walk, swim, glide, fly; they are in the air, 

 and you breathe them. Invisible, they make known their 

 presence by the most painful wounds. The hardiest of men, 

 the buccaneers and filibusters of old, who carried on their 

 nefarious doings chiefly within tropical areas, declared that of 

 all dangers and of all pains they dreaded most the wounds of 

 insects. Frequently intangible, and even invisible, they are 

 destruction under an unavoidable form. How shall we oppose 

 them when they make war upon us in legions ? Their means 

 of offence, too, are varied and terrible. No chimrgical im- 

 plement invented by modern art can be compared with the 

 monstrous armour of tropical insects ; their pincers, their 

 nippers, their teeth, their saws, their horns, their augurs, all 

 the tools of combat and dissection with which they come 

 armed to the battle, and with which they labour, pierce, cut, 

 rend, and finely partition with skill and dexterity, are only 

 equalled by their furious ravenousness. In those lands of 

 fire where the rapidity of decomposition renders every corpse 

 dangerous, where death threatens life, these terrible accelera- 

 tors of the disappearance of animal bodies multiply ad infi- 

 nitum. A corpse scarcely touches the earth before it is seized, 

 attacked, disorganized, dissected. Only the bones are left. 

 They are active hunters and insatiable gluttons. Compared 



