INSECTS AND THEIK EEMEDIES. 97 



losses in the United States probably amount to such an 

 enormous sum, that nearly fifty million dollars might be 

 saved through a more generally extended knowledge of 

 the habits of insects. If insects play such a part in our 

 economy, and^ if the farmer's property is more liable to 

 injury than that of any other class, who more than him- 

 self should be interested in them, and the remedies 

 to abate the evil? There is no part of animated nature 

 more vital to our welfare than insects, of which there 

 are about fifty thousand species inhabiting the United 

 States. 



The study of entomology has been frequently looked 

 down upon by the ignorant with ridicule, in consequence 

 of the minuteness of many of its objects; yet it is exactly 

 in these small members of creation that are exhibited the 

 most wonderful adaptations of means to purposes, and 

 the most amazing wisdom of the Creator! 



Can the tiger, with its fierce leap, by which he catches 

 his prey, and the retractile claw, by which he secures it, 

 or the giraffe, with his long neck and tongue, by which he 

 reaches the leaves, many feet from the ground, be com- 

 pared with the spider? This insect lurks behind a screen 

 of its own manufacture, ready to pounce upon and tie up 

 any helpless insect, which conveys to it by the vibration 

 of the web, the intelligence of its entanglement. In 

 this web each single thread consists of many thousands 

 of finer strands, a part only of which in the net of geomet- 

 ric spiders, the circles, is provided with a viscid covering 

 to hold the captive. Which seems the greater manifesta- 

 tion of divine wisdom: the clumsy she bear that brings 

 food to her hungry cubs, directly appealing to her ma- 

 ternal care, or the sand-wasp, which, after depositing an 

 egg in a cell at the bottom of a cylindrical cavity in the 

 sand, supplies the future larva with food in the form of 

 insects ? She so regulates the number of these, that the 

 larva may have sufficient food; she stings the insects, 





