INSECTS. 



291 



it accumulates on the head or body ? Why should new 

 insects year after year make a perpetually changing 

 warfare against the farmer's crops in gradation with the 

 exhaustion of the soil ? Why should the Hessians bring 

 the Hessian fly, or vice versa, as you please ? And a 

 great many other Whys which never have been and. 

 never will be answered till the " heavens shall be rolled 

 up as a scroll." 



Insects feed voraciously on leaves, vegetables, fruit, on 

 human blood sad to relate and fortunately on one 

 another. Mosquitoes, thank Heaven, have parasites that 

 cling to the delicate rings of their bodies, stinging the 

 arch-stinger, and inflicting by their venomous bites the 

 same agonies the sufferers inflict on others. It is to be 

 hoped those gentlemen will increase and multiply, and 

 after exterminating mosquitoes may pay their addresses 

 to the black gnats. Certain families, especially of the 

 coleoptera, emit a species of phosphorescent light in the 

 dark, occasionally light enough to read by. The majority 

 of insects have wings, but many have not, and in some 

 only one gender is winged. A few kinds, such as the 

 locusts, katydids, crickets, death-ticks, emit sounds, to 

 which man's sympathies have added either a pleasant or 

 painful association, and produce these peculiar cries gen- 

 erally by rubbing the wings or some part of the body. 

 The wings of insects do not exceed four, and are often 

 limited to two; their legs are six; some have antennae 

 or feelers, others long whisks from their tails. 



The neuroptera, or net- winged insects, florfiiegen, gauze- 

 flies, as they are called by the Germans, include the 

 principal pets of the fly-fisher. Their bodies are long, 



