WINTER MEETING. 233 



€ven assists in making- some brands of chewing tobacco more irresitible 

 than they otherwise would be to the devotees of the weed. 



Another luxury for which we are indebted to the honey bee is wax. 

 This is used chieily in the manufacture of those most aesthetic and 

 beautifying illnminants, wax candles. In our day of kerosene, gas and 

 electricity the candle of any sort is simply a luxury, but as such, those 

 made of wax are still largely used by the artistic and fashionable, and 

 by the devout as native oflFerings before shrines of the Madonna and 

 other potent saints. In the arts wax has some uses for which no other 

 material is equal, and the demand, at prices profitable to the producer, 

 has always been equal to the supply. 



In considering the directly useful insects in the order of their im- 

 portance to civilized man, we now come to those from which are ob- 

 tained colors, lac, resins and coccus wax, which is very different in 

 composition and in uses from beeswax. If I did not limit the species 

 to those utilized by civilized man, I should proceed to enumerate the 

 large number of insects which often preserve savage and semi-civilized 

 man from starvation, but will leave these to be touched upon later. 



Of the two properties of material things that appeal to the eye, 

 viz.: form and color, it is difficult to say which most quickly asserts 

 the attention, or which gives greatest satisfaction. Nor is it necessary 

 that we should attempt to balance the claims of one against the other, 

 as both are, in a measure, indispensable to our conception of every 

 object in the universe. Harmonious colors are an essential element of 

 aesthetic enjoyment, and their value is in no danger of depreciation so 

 long as nature, with her magic pencil of sunbeams, keeps such aglow- 

 lug and varied panorama ever before our eyes. And, as the eye of 

 man revels in the celestial glories of the sunset, or swells restfully 

 upon the blue of the sea, or the verdure of forest and field, what 

 wonder is it that he seeks, with enthusiasm, the means of reproducing 

 their beauty in his own comparatively, puny creations and combina- 

 tions ? To do this he has placed under contribution the mineral, vege- 

 table and animal kingdoms; and with such success, that he is almost 

 ready to challenge nature herself, to display a tint with which his art 

 cannot vie. Among the most important of color producers are certain 

 species of insects. These, almcst without exception, belong to a group 

 distinguished for its vast numbers and general destructiveness, viz: 

 the scale insects or bark-lice, and in the useful species man has found 

 some compensation for the injury inflicted upon him by their predatory 

 allies. 



Associated with the Tyrian purple — the ancient badge of royalty — 

 which was the secretion of a small mollusc, found along the shores of 



