1 5 2 London Insects. 



" civil citizens," " poor mechanic porters," and 

 " officers of sorts," all looking up to their heaven- 

 appointed sovereign 



" Who busied with his Majesty surveys 

 The singing masons building roofs of gold," 



and the arguments drawn from them for " the divine 

 right of kings," might have fallen more consistently 

 from the lips of his namesake, Henry the Fifth of 

 France, who chose to live and die in exile at 

 Frohsdorf " the shore the tide was to reach at the 

 appointed time," which never came rather than give 

 up his white flag and be a king by compromise. 



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 appropriate a name. The order like the " pas- 

 seres" 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 chrysalis. The name, which of course 

 means "half wings," is, as already explained, in- 

 tended to convey the idea of an insect having one 

 of its two pairs of wings partly thickened. The 

 order is thus a halfway house between the trans- 



