THE MONSTERS OF OUR BACK YARDS 



605 



A COMMON RED ANT (fonuica Sp.), 

 PAGE 608 



There are probably five times as many 

 species of ants in the world as there are 

 species of birds in the whole of North 

 America. There must be hundreds of 

 times as many individuals. "They are 

 undoubtedly the highest, structurally and 

 mechanically, of all insects and at the 

 same time the most efficient." Their so- 

 cial organization has been the admiration 

 of human beings from the earliest times, 

 because the interest of the individual is 

 merged so completely into that of the 

 colony ; but, as Wheeler remarks, their 

 organization must strike the individualist 

 with horror. It is an organization of 

 females, too. The workers are females, 

 the soldiers are females, the nurses are 

 females, and there is one queen mother 

 for them all, who lays all the eggs of the 

 colony. \\'here are the males, those rep- 

 resentatives of society, those voters of 

 our human colonies? They do not exist 

 as such, for the males of ant colonies 

 are but mates for the young queens. 

 Together with them they leave the nest 

 on their marriage day and together make 

 the marriage flight, but as soon as this is 

 over they die and the colony gets on 

 easily without them. To man. who is 

 the most rapidly evolving organism on 

 the earth today, it is a strange thought 

 that the most highly developed insect 

 which the world has produced, and w^hich 

 has not changed materially since the 

 Tertiary epoch, has relegated the males 

 to the short-lived function of reproduc- 

 tion, leaving him no work to perform 

 and getting rid of him as quickly as pos- 

 sible. Why did the ants, wnth their mar- 

 velous instincts, fail to conquer the 

 world? Why have they stood still for 

 thousands of years after they had per- 

 fected their social organization? Did 

 they go as far as evolution could go 

 when it leaves the male out of account ? 

 It is perhaps a comfort to think that, 

 after all, they have failed and the man- 

 guided organization of human beings has 

 surpassed them in its development. 



FORE PART or A BROWN BUTTERFLY (-/r- 



gynnis cyhcle), page 610 

 It is hard to realize that this is the 



portrait of the head and fore part of a 

 beautiful brown buttertly. 



Its head is almost all taken up with 

 the gigantic eyes, which are composed 

 of thousands of tiny facets. The long, 

 trunk-like mouth with which it sucks the 

 nectar from the flowers is coiled up like 

 a watch spring. Like shingles on a roof, 

 the scales are fastened in tiers over the 

 broad surface of the wings stretched 

 over the stitf ribs or frame-work. 



The white spots are made by hundreds 

 of white scales and the brown blotches by 

 brown scales, and what these scales are 

 for nobody seems to know. Perhaps 

 they help to grip the wind, for they have 

 running lengthwise of them deep and 

 parallel corrugations so small and fine 

 that were a single scale as large as a 

 lady's opened fan these corrugations 

 would represent its sticks. 



The caterpillar from which this splen- 

 did creature came is black, with branch- 

 ing spines and feeds at night on violets 

 and other plants. 



The graceful beauty of the butterfly, 

 its seemingly happy existence, its life 

 among the flowers, where it sips the 

 nectar that the flowers provide, are all a 

 part of common knowledge. 



The real life of the butterfly, however, 

 is not so pleasant as we think. Have vou 

 ever found a butterfly hanging beneath a 

 leaf on a cold summer morning drenched 

 Avith dew and stifif with cold ? Have you 

 ever seen one trying to cross a field in a 

 rain-storm and observed it vainly at- 

 tempting to navigate the conflicting air 

 currents ? Where do they roost at night 

 and on rainy days ? Where do they conie 

 from and what becomes of them ? These 

 are matters which it has often taken men 

 years to find out. and even now there are 

 many thousands of species of butterflies 

 which are known only by a preserved 

 specimen caught in its flight by the net 

 of some collector. 



It is easy to tell any butterfly from a 

 moth by the clubs which it has on its 

 antennre. and although the entomologists 

 have decided that this classification is un- 

 scientific, it is quite as uneducated to call 

 one of these beautiful creatures with 

 club-shaped antenuc-e a moth as it is to 

 call a mouse a rat or a lizard a snake. 



