NATURE STUDY LESvSONS. 239 



millipede, or " thousand legs," as the centipede is called a 

 " hundred legs," although I suppose it never has quite 

 so many as that. " Thousand legs ' ' and " hundred legs " 

 may be put near together, or in the same pile, for they are 

 a sort of cousins — very queer, old-fashioned cousins, too, 

 who have not changed their ways for a thousand years, 

 and more — not even since the time when the coal was 

 made, and that is longer ago than anybody can remember. 



Of course there will be some spiders in the collection, 

 and perhaps some harvestmen, or "daddy-long-legs." 

 The children will at first almost surely think the spiders 

 have five pairs of legs, but if they look sharp they will find 

 that the front pair, which look like legs, have a different 

 number of joints from the true legs. In reality, they are 

 not legs at all, but feelers. So the spiders have eight legs, 

 and as the harvestmen have eight legs also, they may be 

 put in the same pile, or near it, for they are cousins to the 

 spiders. 



Now count the legs on the beetles, the butterflies, the 

 bees, the flies, the crickets and the grasshoppers. All 

 these and many other creatures have six legs, and are 

 known as the true insects, but they differ widely among 

 themselves. Some have two pairs of wings, some have 

 one pair, and some have no wings at all. Some of these 

 insects with four wings have the front and hind pairs al- 

 most alike, some have them alike in texture but unlike in 

 shape, and some have the front pair leathery, while in oth- 

 ers the front pair have given wa}' to hard and horny wing- 

 covers. 



Some insects have jaws that they bite and chew with, 

 moving them sidewise ; others have long, hollow, jointed, 

 sharp-pointed beaks, with which they suck juices from 

 plants or animals. 



All these kinds of insects that have six legs can be put 

 into seven piles. Some wise men think there ought to 



