46 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS. 



probably lives, with a sense of vision revealing to him more 

 than our microscopes show to us, and with his minute eye- 

 like ear-bag sensifying material movements that lie betAveen 

 our world of sounds and our other far-distant worlds of 

 heat and light. 



There is yet another indication of some sort of interme- 

 diate sensation possessed by insects. Many of them are 

 not only endowed with the thousands of lenses of their 

 compound eyes, but have in addition several curious organs 

 that have been designated "ocelli" and "stemmata." 

 These are generally placed at the top of the head, the thou- 

 sand-fold eyes being at the sides. They are very much like 

 the auditory organs above described so much so that in 

 consulting different authorities for special information on 

 the subject I have fallen into some confusion, from which 

 I can only escape by supposing that the organ which one 

 anatomist describes as the ocelli of certain insects is re- 

 garded as the auditory apparatus when examined in an- 

 other insect by another anatomist. All this indicates a 

 sort of continuity of sensation connecting the sounds of 

 the insect world with the objects of their vision. 



But these ocular ears or auditory eyes of the insect are 

 not his only advantage over us. He has another sensory 

 organ to which, with all our boasted intellect, we can claim 

 nothing that is comparable, unless it be our olfactory 

 nerve. The possibility of this I will presently discuss. 



I refer to the antenna, which are the most characteristic 

 of insect organs, and wonderfully developed in some, as 

 may be seen by examining the plumes of the crested gnat. 

 Everybody who has carefully watched the doings of insects 

 must have observed the curiously investigative movements 

 of the antennas, which are ever on the alert, peering and 

 prying to right and left and upwards and downwards. 

 Huber, who devoted his life to the study of bees and ants, 

 concluded that these insects converse with each other by 

 movements of the antennas, and he has given to the signs 

 thus produced the name of "antennal language." They 

 certainly do communicate information or give orders by 

 some means ; and when the insects stop for that purpose, 

 they face each other and execute peculiar wavings of these 



