244 



SCIENGE. 



[N. S. Vol. IX. No. 216. 



incredible numbers ; some of them pass 

 their whole life underground, feeding upon 

 roots and rootlets, upon dead and decaying 

 vegetable matter, upon soil humus and 

 upon other insects ; many of them have 

 their nests underground, although they get 

 their food elsewhere ; while others hide 

 their eggs or pupre underground. 



The depth to which they penetrate is 

 something surprising ; the minute insects 

 of the family Poduridse have been found 

 swarming literallj- by the million at a depth 

 of six to eight feet in a stiff clay subsoil. 



AS FOOD AND CLOTHING AND AS USED IN THE 

 ARTS. 



In this role insects play an important 

 part. Insects as food, and their products 

 as clothing, are well known to all. The 

 great silk industry of the world is derived 

 wholly from insects, and almost entirely 

 from a single species, the silkworm of com- 

 merce. 



As food, insects have formed articles of 

 diet for certain savage peoples since the 

 beginning of the human race. Hope, in 

 1842, catalogued forty-six species of insects 

 used as food, and Wallace, in 185i, showed 

 that insects of six different Orders were used 

 as food by the Indians of the Amazon. 

 Semi-civilized peoples to-day use certain in- 

 sects as food, as witness the consumption 

 of Corixa eggs by the Mexicans, and a book 

 has been written under the caption ' Why 

 not eat insects ? ' for the purpose of show- 

 ing that many possibilities in the way of 

 dietetics are being ignored to-day. M. de 

 Fontvielle, in addressing the Societe d'ln- 

 sectologie, in 1883, expressed regret that the 

 attempts made to popularize the use of in- 

 sects as food have made so little progress, 

 and said that we ought not to forget the 

 remark of the Eoman Emperor who said 

 that the body of an enemy never tasted 

 bad, and that the banquet of the Society 

 would always lack something so long as 



there was not placed before them at least 

 some grasshopper farina and fried white 

 worms. 



A single insect, the honey bee, furnishes 

 a notable article of food, and is the basis of 

 a great and world-wide industry. 



As food for poultry, song birds and food 

 fish, insects are indirectly of great benefit 

 to man. Not only do they provide living 

 food for such animals, but Corixa mercenaria, 

 a water bug, is now being imported by the 

 ton from Mexico into England as food for 

 birds, poultry, game and fish. One ton of 

 these bugs has been computed by Mr. G. 

 W. Kirkaldy to contain 250,000,000 of in- 

 sects (Entomologists^ Monthly Magazine, Au- 

 gust, 1898). 



In the days of pure empiricism in medi- 

 cine, insects were used extensively, and we 

 have only to mention the Spanish fly to 

 show that they are still of some value. 



In the arts, shellac and Chinese white 

 wax, as is well known, are insect products, 

 as also are the formerly greatly used coch- 

 ineal dye and Polish berry dye, the so-called 

 berry in this case being an insect and not a 

 berrjr. 



The last-named instances are all derived 

 from scale insects, a group of astonishing 

 capacity for multiplication, the commercial 

 possibilities of which are by no means ex- 

 hausted, as I took pleasure in showing in a 

 paper read before the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science in 1897. It 

 should be noted here, also, that there is 

 good reason to believe that the manna of 

 the Bible, upon which the Children of Israel 

 subsisted while in the Wilderness, was also 

 the secretion of a scale insect. 



SUMMARY OF THE HABITS OF INSECTS. 



After this general account, arranged under 

 the classes of damage and classes of benefits 

 brought about by insects, it will be well to 

 attempt an arrangement of the subject in a 

 somewhat difiPerent manner, in order to gain, 



