90 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



no: a million sights and sounds to feed eye, ear and brain, if man 

 could but grasp them. The camera was a constant friend and life 

 had an added charm when the photomicrographic field still farther 

 enlarged our vision. 



Bugs and Butterflies. 



Introduction Day was repeated several times by that obliging 

 State microbiologist and when fall winds had swirled from the oak 

 most of its leaves and disclosed to our newly awakened appreciation 

 of insect life the tightly woven leaf nest of the caterpillar, intro- 

 ductions had culminated in an extended but one sided calling list, and 

 .as winter approached we lost no time in making many aurelian calls. 



Man's very existence rests on the gauze wings of the bee and 

 the butterfly. At the base of the pyramid of all life is the insect 

 world. An insectless world is in the main a flowerless world, with the 

 unavoidable sequence of death to bird, beast and man. Adjustment 

 and balance can only be obtained through control of the predatory 

 hordes that swarm over our planet, their seeming aim man's destruc- 

 tion, but changed by a directing hand to construction. It is an 

 innumerable army that of these night and day propagators and scav- 

 engers who close heel man's progress toward the zenith of his 

 powers, and as he draws aside the veil and peers into the outer court 

 of this phase of nature he senses unseen and potent forces far beyond 

 his present ability to understand. The microscope and the avarium 

 aid mightily toward mastering the alphabet of the insect life. 

 Man's physical inhumanity to man is as nothing to the carnage and 

 butchery with which the insect world reeks from pole to pole. Let 

 us hope that the line immortalizing the dying worm "it feels a pang 

 as deep as when a giant dies" is only poetic license. 



Insect life is prolific in schemes to side-track the, juggernaut of 

 destruction that even before birth is often on its trail following out 

 the wonderful warring laws by which nature is kept in equilibrium.* 



When the praying martin or devil's riding horse fiercely devours 

 his victims alive, and the ichneumon fly incubates under the skin or 

 within the intestinal canal of its benefactor, then slowly devours the 

 inner vitals, pierces through the skin an avenue to freedom, and leaves 

 by the wayside the shell tenement of its protector, let us hope that 

 neither nerve, muscle, nor delicate organ has felt what to man's sensi- 

 tively attuned system would have been untold agony. Insect life, 

 the most prolific of all life, claims the closest study. Here the sur- 

 vival of the fittest is pronounced. To eat, to live, to escape its 

 enemies and to propagate, is its entire decalog, as in primeval man, 

 but the endless nonillions of the insect world aggregating in the 



*The star and the aphis are extremes in realms heretofore practically untrod by man. 

 Authorities state that a single pair of garden aphides absolutely undisturbed would in a few 

 months plaster the entire globe with a solid mass of their progeny, as the fish of the ocean 

 unless preyed on by their fellows would turn that stupendous ocean into a mass of putrid flesh. 



A world out of balance would cease to be a world. 



