INTRODUCTION 



the marvellous provisions that have been made for 

 keeping at bay those species whose misdeeds, unless 

 thus checked, would spell disaster not only for our- 

 selves, but for other earth-creatures who share with us 

 all a common heritage in the wonder-world through 

 which we are destined to pass and play no unimportant 

 part. 



Of the remote ancestry of these insect-folk their fossil 

 remains testify, and in the course of a most illuminating 

 discourse on the age of insects. Professor G. H. Car- 

 penter writes : — " We often take mountains as emblems 

 of age, and speak of the * everlasting hills.' The most 

 advanced orders of insects are older than the chalk of 

 the southern English downs, while the early winged 

 insects flitted by the shores of the lakes wherein the 

 grits and sandstones of the Kerry Rocks gathered frag- 

 ment by fragment. For the primitive wingless insects 

 we must look at least to the time when by accumulation 

 of coral, and the ash and lava of old volcanos, the rocks 

 of Snowdon were being slowly formed on the bed of 

 the Primary Sea, and the oldest rocks of the Western 

 Highlands of Scotland will hardly carry us back to the 

 primeval arthropods. We walk over the hills rousing 

 the Bee from the flower, or the Dragon Fly from the 

 rushes. The life of each individual insect lasts but for 

 a few days, or months, or years. Yet these creatures 

 are the latest links in a long chain of life which reaches 

 back to a time before the mountain whereon they dwell 

 was brought forth. To unobservant eyes the landscape 



