NATURE'S CRAFTSMEN 



and especially to plants, is prepared to believe that these 

 innumerable hordes must have wrought in all time, and 

 still must be exerting an enormous influence upon the 

 mundane home of man, and upon man himself. 



Long before man's apparition upon the geological 

 horizon, insects were here. They must have had a 

 foremost place in that mighty procession of zoological 

 life that has moved through terrestrial history. Their 

 fragile forms are not well adapted to survive the lapse 

 of ages and the convulsions of world-building. But the 

 mysterious Recorder, whose hand has graven upon the 

 rocks the history of Creation, has not omitted them. 

 Embalmed in the resins of sunken forests, and entombed 

 in the mud-beds of ancient lakes, the fossils of the amber 

 and of the shales have shown that insects early existed, 

 in number, in forms, and in habits, not greatly unlike 

 their congeners and successors of the present. Had 

 such witnesses been wanting, the remains of insect- 

 eating animals — birds, arachnids, reptiles, and quad- 

 rupeds — ^would have supplied the record. Thus insects 

 have had a place in the development of the globe as we 

 know it. Have they also had a part as forerunners of 

 man in preparing the earth for Nature's masterpiece? 

 And do we know, or can we conjecture what that part 

 has been? Let us see. 



The inter-relationship of created things, the adjust- 

 ments and balances, the action and reaction of forces 

 and objects upon one another and upon the whole, are 

 too delicate and complex, and too obscurely set within 

 their own secluded spheres, and our knowledge is as 

 yet too limited, to permit us to specify or to speak with 

 assurance. But enough is known to justify the inference 

 that throughout the geologic periods insects were an 



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