298 



Marvels of Insect Life. 



get to other towns or villages probably had to depend upon man carrying it among 

 his merchandise. Gilbert White, somewhere about the year 1790, complains that 

 cockroaches are swarming in his chimney closets and kitchen, and says he has 

 not observed them till recently. They had, apparently, not long reached 

 Selborne. 



This common cockroach is a little over an inch in length when full grown. Only the 

 male is winged, and the wing-covers extend over about two-thirds of his hind-body, 

 whilst the wings themselves are shorter. The wing-covers are leathery and opaque. 

 The female is much broader than the male, and the absence of wings gives her a more 

 repulsive appearance than that of the male. In both sexes there is a pair of long, 

 slender, and sensitive antennae, and at the other end of the body is a pair of short, 

 stouter, antenna-like organs. The antennae are a little longer than the body in the 

 male ; a little shorter than the body in the female ; and they consist of from seventy- 

 five to ninety joints each. 



The mouth is furnished with powerful jaws, whose edges are well toothed 



and capable of cutting up the very various 

 substances upon which the cockroach 

 will feed. Probably no other Insect is 

 so perfectlv omnivorous as the cockroach. 

 Anything that man cats, or wears, or other- 

 wise uses, the cockroach will and docs 

 eat. This may appear to be too sweeping 

 a statement, but one cannot give a com- 

 plete list of the things they have been 

 known to consume, because of its excessive 

 length ; yet when one selects as examples 

 such unpromising articles as woollen clothes, 

 boot uppers, blacking, ink, emery paper, 

 their own cast-skins, and their dead com- 

 panions, it may be considered that their 

 possible bill of fare is by no means limited. 

 Professor Moseley refers to the annoyance he received from the attentions of a larger 

 species on board H.M.S. Challenger. He says : "At one period of the voyage, 

 a number of these Insects established themselves in my cabin, and devoured parts 

 of my boots, nibbling off all the margins of leather projecting beyond the seams 

 on the upper leathers. One huge winged cockroach for a long time baffled me in 

 my attempts to get rid of him. I could not discover his retreat. At night he came 

 out and rested on my bookshelf, at the foot of mv bed, swaying his antennae to an(J 

 fro, and watching me closely. If I reached out my hand from the bed, to get a stick, 

 or raised my book to throw it at him, he dropped at once on deck, and was forthwith 

 out of harm's way. He bothered me much, because whc-n m\ liglit was out, he had 

 a familiar habit of coming to sip the moisture from m\- face and lips, which was 

 decidedly unpleasant, and often awoke me from a do/e. I believe it was with 

 this object that he watched me before I went to sleep. 1 often had a shot at him 

 with a book or other missile, as he sat on the book-shelf, but he alwa^^s dodged and 



PhDio by] [W. J. Lucas, F.E.S. 



Common Cockroach. 

 The " black-beetle " of domestic parlance. The two sexes 

 are shown, that to the left being the female and to the right 

 the male. The latter, it will be noticed, has wings, but the 

 female is always wingless, although vestiges of the organs are 

 to be seen just behind the head. 



