THE COCKROACH. 117 



is provided with them. The cockroach is not particular as 

 to its food, and will devour almost anything that comes in 

 its way. Crumbs of bread, fragments of fat or meat, sweets 

 of all kinds, and indeed almost all food consumed by man, 

 are welcome to it. It has a marked partiality for boot 

 blacking, and is even able to digest leather. It will drink 

 water, but its tendency is rather towards liquids of a sweet 

 or intoxicating nature. Treacle or sugar in water attracts it, 

 but it has a marked preference for beer, and traps for its 

 ensnarement are generally baited with this liquor. 



Unlike the cricket and the grasshopper, the cockroach is 

 mute, at least so far as our ears are able to perceive, although 

 it is certain that it can carry on long conversations with its 

 own species, and two of them may often be seen standing 

 head to head in close confabulation, enforcing their argu- 

 ments with waves and flourishes of their antennae. Entomo- 

 logists may assign the blatta a specific place among the 

 orders and genera of insects in accordance with their cha- 

 racteristics, but morally they stand apart. They are the rats 

 of the insect world, swarming out in their armies from dark 

 recesses in search of garbage ; no one, indeed, can doubt that, 

 had they the power, they would not hesitate to follow the 

 example of the rats on the Rhine, and to devour a bishop if 

 he fell in their way. Other insects stand apart from them. 

 The cricket may dwell in their midst, but he is not of them, 

 while no observer has remarked a single case of friendship 

 between the industrious bee, the impetuous and hard- 

 working wasp, or, indeed, any other of what may be called 

 respectable insects, with the cockroach a strong proof that 

 the creature is viewed with the same marked disfavour by 

 the insect world that it excites in the breast of man. 



