CHAPTER IV 



LONDON INSECTS (continued) 



' The insect youth is on the wing, 

 Eager to taste the honied spring, 

 And float amid the liquid noon.' GRAY. 



THE Bees have led us too far from London to allow 

 a return to the Ants, which Sir John Lubbock has 

 made his own peculiar property, and we come to the 

 next order, the Hemiptera. If there were any neat 

 Greek word meaning ' hotch-potch,' or, better still, 

 ' confession of failure,' either would be quite as appro- 

 priate a name. The order like the ' Passeres ' among 

 the Birds is the receptacle for the thousands of little 

 creatures which cannot clearly be brought under any 

 other of the accepted orders, and contains, as might 

 be expected, what seems to unscientific people a most 

 incongruous lot. The different classes of the order have 

 very little more in common than that, as a rule, they 

 have sucking beaks (Bugs are Hemiptera), and do not 

 undergo what is called ' complete metamorphosis,' that 

 is to say, do not sleep away part of their existence 

 as helpless chrysalises. The name, which of course 

 means 'half wings,' is, as already explained, intended 

 to convey the idea of an insect having one of its two 



