precedinu' the discovery of the sugar cane, and the silk worm furnislies still 

 the most costly raiment with which we clothe ourselves. 



Th(^ friends we have in the insect world arc those which destroy tlic pests 

 of our culti\ated cro]is like the Australian lady-bird beetle wliich has been 

 sent from one country to the other to keep in check the fluted scale which 

 is so injurious to the orange orchards, and the jjarasites of the gipsy-moth 

 which, in Europe, helps to keej) under control this ])lague of oin' forest trees, 

 must certainly Ijc counted as our friends. 



Also, they are our friends if. like the spiders, they kill such monsters as 

 suck our blood or make our lives unsafe, or, like the great hortles of wasps 

 and hornets, wage unending warfare against the flies but which, liecause 

 they attack us ])ersonally if we come too near their nests, we kill on sight. 

 Strangely enough, it is often these same stinging insects which liel]) us by 

 fertilizing the Ijlossoms of our fruit trees. Indeed many ])lants are so de|)cnd- 

 ent on these little creatures that they ha\e lost the jjower (jf self-fertilizing 

 and thousands of spei-ies of trees and i)lants would become extinct in a gener- 

 ation without their friendly aid. 



The ancestors of some of the creatures i)ictmed in this book were buried 

 in the trans])arent amber of the Baltic many thousands of years ago and the 

 fossil remains of others date back a million years or more, but while man 

 has been develoiiing his surroundings from the primitive ones of savagery to the 

 almost inconceivably complicated ones of civilized life, these creatures, most 

 of them at least, seem to be leading essentially the same kind of lives that they 

 led huudrc'ds of thousands of .vears ago. 



The.v have powers which neither uuxn nor any other mammal ever dreamed 

 of having. 



Some have powers of flight which enable them to sail a thousand miles 

 before the wind. Others can jnui]) a hundred times their own lengih. One 

 of these monsters can manufacture a liquid rope as easil.v as mammals pro- 

 duce milk and with it weave aerial nets to traj) their i)re.v or, b.v attaching it, 

 can drop from the dizziest heights without danger, and when the rope has 

 served its jjurpose they eat it u]). 



Their weapons of defense are comparable to the deadly ones that only 

 poisonous serpents ha\e. If they were larger the.v would lie, in fact, what 

 legend ])ictures the dragons to have been. 



The unthinkably old germ jjlasni of these species i)rotluces creatures which 

 act with a precision of purpose and a degree of absolute self-sacrifice which 

 cannot fail to stagger the most conscientious of the human race. They 

 might e\en make one wonder whether the fulfillment of l)iological life does 

 not consist in sacrifice of the iudi\'idual for the good of the sjiecies to which 

 it belongs. 



Certain it is, that human thought is now drifting away from the considera- 

 tion of the inilividual an<l is coming to pay more attention to the species and 

 the things which atl'ect its development. This is a picture book j)roduced in 



