32 Bugs, Butterflies, and Beetles 



the sun, it would take two thousand five hun- 

 dred YEARS for the light to reach the earth! Think 

 of it! If this line had been projected up into the 

 sky, into space, and the last little bug had flashed 

 his light five hundred years before the birth of 

 Christ, we, to-day, would not yet have been able to 

 see that light, we would not even know it was there. 



Creeping, crawling, flying, burrowing over and 

 under the crust of this old earth, are about one 

 million different kinds of creatures, of which we 

 have only labelled and sorted out about three hun- 

 dred thousand varieties. Of course you will not 

 find them all in this book or any other book; it 

 would take many of Carnegie's largest libraries to 

 hold enough books to describe them all. 



The writer has lived quite a while, but during 

 his lifetime there have been only a few mammals 

 discovered (you see the mammals or milk-giving 

 animals are so big that they are easily found if one 

 visits their haunts ) , but every day we can walk over 

 new bugs, butterflies and beetles without seeing 

 them, or miss them even when hunting for them; 

 this makes the game fascinating and much more 

 interesting and useful than collecting birds' eggs 

 or birds. Why, every bird wears a halo around 



