DIVISION EIGHT — SCIENCE. 603 



fight nor crawl away, but it still lives. The wasp then digs a small pit for 

 the tarantula to drop into, and lays its eggs there ; and when the little wasp 

 grubs come forth they burrow into the body of the paralytic which their 

 provident mother had fixed there for them, and grow fat and sleek on its 

 tarantulan juices. 



A very large insect called " hawk moth " has a spread of wings four to 

 five inches, and a very long proboscis or suction tube, which it has to wind 

 up into three or four coils when it flies. It may be seen hovering over 

 flowers in the evening, sucking honey through its long tube, and is often 

 mistaken for some curious species of humming bird. Colors, gray, black 

 and yellow. It is the tomato worm moth, or 5-spotted sphinx. 



Another conspicuous insect is the white-lined sphinx. It is olive green, 

 white, black and rose colored, or a sort of pinkish tinge ; it also hovers 

 about the honey flowers in the evening, with a three-inch spread of wing: 

 and is frequently mistaken for a species of humming bird. I have some- 

 times seen I suppose a thousand of these moths lying dead around on the 

 ground under an argand electric light, into the fiery glare of which they 

 and other species had plunged to their death during the night. 



The Jerusalem cricket, or " Spanish cricket " as it is also called, is a 

 peculiarly large California variety. It incubates deep in the ground during 

 the dry season, and when the rains come to soften the earth, and the early 

 spring warmth develops life generally, this creature bores its way to the sur- 

 face and comes forth. It is a large, fat, clumsy cricket — I think the largest 

 one known — and furnishes a rare feast for poultry and some of the larger 

 native birds. It is a pest in the potato field and injures the crop by gnaw- 

 ing cavities in the potatoes when they are nearly or quite full grown. 



In the early colony days Pasadena was ravaged with grasshoppers — a 

 local variety, and not the migratory grasshopper or "locust " of the easterly 

 Rocky mountain slopes. But the plowing from year to year destroyed 

 their eggs by exposure, and the Pasadena grasshoper is no longer known as 

 a pest. [See page 144.] 



In 1893, ^t Echo Mountain I found specimens of the " praying Mantis," 

 a species of the " walking leaf " insects. It is a small or medium sized 

 variety, and most likely to be found on sycamore trees or willows. I have 

 never seen it except in Echo canyon or glen, though I doubt not it occurs 

 elsewhere ; and it is one of the most singular of our native insects Sobieski 

 Lowe in 1893, and Joseph Grinnellin 1894, ^^^^ informed me that they had 

 found specimens of this rare insect at the same place, but not elsewhere. 



In the little ponds of the mountain canyons there is found a very 

 curious kind of water beetle — a real amphibian insect, for when the pool it 

 happens to be in dries up, it will spread its wings and fly away to another. 

 But ordinarily it looks like a small turtle creeping about at the bottom of a 

 pool, and without necessity of coming to the surface for air ; yet it can live 



