Vol. XXIV, No. 5 



WASHINGTON 



May, I9I3 



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'ATEOMAL 

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THE MONSTERS OF OUR BACK YARDS 



Bv David Fairchild 



In Charge; of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, Department of 



Agriculture 



Author of "Our Plant Inrniigrants," "Xczv Plant Immigrants," and "Madeira, On 

 the Way to Italy," in the Xational Geographic Magazine 



M 



Y TASK is to open to the 

 readers of the National Geo- 

 graphic Magazine a door into 

 a world as full of romance as the fairy 

 tales of Grimm or Andersen. 



But first I must tell you how it came 

 about that an agricultural explorer should 

 dare to present a theme so far removed 

 from the one with which his life has been 

 associated. 



I sat down one Sunday afternoon to 

 write a story for my little boy about the 

 creatures which he Avas finding around 

 my laboratory in the woods. He was 

 hunting for them with the same enthusi- 

 asm that a big-game hunter stalks his 

 game in the jungle, and the thought 

 flashed into my mind, why shouldn't we 

 hunt them with a camera just as Shiras 

 and Dugmore and others have done. It 

 is true our monsters were small, while 

 theirs were big; but then theirs were as 

 much too large for the photographic plate 

 as ours were too small. They w^ere 

 forced to reduce the image of each beast 

 to the limit of a five by seven plate, while 

 we would be forced to enlarge ours to 

 the same dimensions. 



The collection of photographs which 

 has grown out of this idea is a miscel- 

 laneous one and has been made without 

 any thought of what would be done with 

 it later, and it was not. therefore, until 

 I accepted the invitation to publish some 



of them that I really began to look into 

 the vast storehouses of literature which 

 describe the life histories of these crea- 

 tures. 



The facts which I have been able to 

 find out about them represent not my 

 own observations, but those of hundreds 

 of trained observers who, working quietly 

 for years and some of them for a life- 

 time, have studied out the habits of these 

 various forms, most of which are so diffi- 

 cult to study that months of patient wait- 

 ing have been required to find out some 

 significant fact about their ways of life. 



I had thought, in my ignorance of the 

 subject, that all of my beasts had names, 

 for they were caught within a stone's 

 throw of my house ; but my entomological 

 friends of the Department of Agriculture 

 and of the Xati(inal Museum found diffi- 

 culty in identifying some which I thought 

 must be common ; and now, since I have 

 read more fully of the vastness of the 

 world which I had entered, I wonder 

 that with only the mummified specimens 

 which I had preserved they could name 

 so many of them. 



In fact, almost the first sentence in the 

 first text-book I opened made the aston- 

 ishing statement that "insects are the 

 most numerous in species and individuals 

 of all land animals. It is estimated that 

 about 250,000 si)ecies have already been 

 described and have had scientific names 



