208 Animals with more than Two Eyes. 
Our green fields and woods, in summer, are gay with creatures 
endowed with more than two eyes. Soaring on gauzy or painted 
wing, in the sunshine, or making the light air luminous in com- 
pany with leathern-winged bats as large as themselves, they look 
upon the world through, not merely hundreds, but thousands of 
eyes, —wonderfully latticed windows and panes of many patterns. 
The world of moths and butterflies, of bees, ants, and beetles, of 
winged visitants to our gardens and study windows, is an inex- 
haustible treasury of animals, too commonly thought to exist 
only in fable. At home, indoors in the winter months, the cricket 
on the hearth, that merry little minstrel, looks upon us with 
hundreds of curiously shaped eyes. 
Among the smaller creatures, the ants of our gardens, con- 
servatories, woods, and fields, afford interesting examples of the 
many-eyed. Some kinds of ants have no eyes at all, but only 
eye-sockets. The males have generally the largest number of 
eyes; as many as twelve hundred have been found in a single 
individual. In the less bountifully endowed species, the eyes 
are found to vary from one to five in number. Each eye is 
hexagonal, or six:sided, in shape. 
These six-sided eyes are the form most commonly found in 
insect-life. Bees, butterflies, beetles, and ants, afford good 
examples of them. ‘The compound eye of the living bee, when 
examined under a lens, shows them in startling numbers. As 
many as twelve thousand six hundred six-sided eyes have been 
found on the head of a single worker bee. 
But another fact remains to be told. Mr. Frank Cheshire, 
one of the most successful ‘ workers” of the London Royal 
Microscopical Society, has carefully measured the diameter of one 
of these twelve thousand six hundred eyes; he finds it to be a 
little more than the thousandth part of an inch. Do not forget 
that each of these six-sided panes is really a separate eye, with its 
own lens, crystalline cone, and microscopic telescope behind, run- 
ning back to the retina, where the picture is formed. There is 
reason to believe that one use of this vast multiplication of eyes 
is to enable the insect to see with tolerable clearness in what 
would be to us darkness. Nearly all the operations carried on in 
the hives are done during the day-time, in very dim light ; and in 
the night time, when work is by no means intermitted, there 
would be to our eyes absolute darkness. To the bees, however, 
the scanty rays, received by so many sensitive points of sight, 
may be sufficient to enable them to see with comparative 
clearness. 
As we have said, the hexagon is the form most commonly 
found in insect eyes. But there are some very curious exceptions 
to the rule. The thousand-eyed drone-fly and the house-cricket 
~ 
