INSECTS. 1-- 



human ear, and causing the victim the most excruciating pain, — a belief 

 which has not the slightest foundation of fact. 



'©' 



COCKEOACHES, CEICKETS, AND LOCUSTS. 



The group of insects embracing the forms enumerated in the heading 

 are classed by naturalists under the heading Orthoptera, a compound word 

 derived from the Greek, which means straight wings. Most of the meml »ers 

 of the group have the front wings narrow and straight, and usually of a 

 parchment-like texture, while the hinder pair of wings are broader, and 

 when not in use in flight, they are folded up like a fan and hidden under 

 the first pair. Almost all the members of the group are classed amono- 

 the injurious insects, from the fact that they feed on vegetation, and thus 

 seriously interfere with the labors of the gardener and the farmer. One 

 has but to recall the plague of grasshoppers which a few years ago devas- 

 tated the farms of Kansas and Nebraska, destroying millions of dollars 

 worth of corn and wheat, to see how injurious these forms may be. They 

 are armed with powerful jaws, which will cut through the succulent leaf 

 or the harder wood, while their numbers and their voracitv enable them to 

 strip a field of grain or grass in a few hours, leaving behind nothing but 

 stubble. 



This group is noticeable from the fact that its members do not pass 

 through a metamorphosis, but gradually grow, with repeated molts, from 

 the young as it escapes from the egg y until the adult condition is reached. 

 Each shedding of the skin is accompanied by small changes in the form 

 and proportions of parts. 



First in order come the cockroaches, animals which, while they prove 

 themselves nuisances everywhere, still have a most respectable ancestry 

 so far as age is concerned: away back in paleozoic times there were cock- 

 roaches with the same flattened bodies, and the same coriaceous wings as 

 to-day; while at the time that our beds of coal were deposited, they crawled 

 about amongst the vegetation, and so they have continued until the present 

 time. To-day they swarm in all our seaport and most of our inland towns, 

 getting into houses and stores, seeming to seek the neighborhood of the 

 water-pipes, and by their ugly shapes, dull colors, disagreeable smell, and 

 above all their ubiquity, making themselves unmitigated nuisances. 



When they once obtain entrance to a house, there is but little hope of 

 getting rid of them. The disgusted housewife will imagine that she has 

 exterminated them, but alas ! they soon reappear in all their 

 numbers. Remedies that seem to kill other insects seem to have little 

 effect on these. Persian insect powder numbs them for a while, but they 



