Micropterygidae 
other writer. Throughout the task has been to a large degree a 
labor of love, with the purpose of popularizing knowledge and 
helping those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, to under¬ 
stand something of the wonders of a world which becomes the 
more wonderful the more we know of it. 
TIIE FINAL GOAL 
“ O, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill, 
To pangs of nature, sins of will, 
Defects of doubt and taints of blood; 
That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete; 
That not a worm is cloven in vain, 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another’s gain.” 
Tennyson. — In Memoriam , I, III. 
THE END 
When the moon shall have faded out from the sky, and the 
sun shall shine at noonday a dull cherry-red, and the seas shall be 
frozen over, and the ice-cap shall have crept downward to the 
equator from either pole, and no keels shall cut the waters, nor 
wheels turn in mills, when all cities shall have long been dead and 
crumbled into dust, and all life shall be on the very last verge of 
extinction on this globe; then, on a bit of lichen, growing on the 
bald rocks beside the eternal snows of Panama, shall be seated a 
tiny insect, preening its antennae in the glow of the worn-out sun, 
representing the sole survival of animal life on this our earth,— 
a melancholy “bug.” 
445 
