266 Forty-fifth Report on the State Museum. 



and admiration, just as, in the other direction, each successive 

 enlargement of the object glass of the telescope brings to our 

 view from the depths of boundless space, suns and systems and 

 galaxies of systems before unknown and unsuspected. 



Number of Insects. 



Insects, in number of species, exceed by far all the rest of 

 the animal kingdom combined. They are believed to be ten fold 

 more numerous than all of the mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles, 

 myriapods, crustaceans, worms, molluscs, radiates, and protozoans, 

 united. At the latter part of the 17th century, they were 

 estimated at 10,000 species. During the last 100 years the dis- 

 covery of new species has been very rapid, and in 1881 there 

 had been described and catalogued throughout the world 320,000 

 species, while many thousands were in collections awaiting name 

 and description — 12,000 in a single collection — that of the 

 British Museum. Judging from past discoveries, we may venture 

 to claim that if all the species inhabiting the world were known, 

 the number would reach one million* 



If, from distinct species, we descend to the consideration of 

 individuals, figures are of no service, for the numbers that we 

 should have to employ would be simply incomprehensible. I 

 have seen at a glance, in a locality near Albany, within a small 

 extent of roadway, of a single species of a ?mow-flea — a Podura, 

 more individuals, as computed by me, than there are human beings 

 on the entire face of the globe. A single small cherry tree of 

 ten feet in height, infested with a plant-louse — one of a row 

 similarly infested — was estimated by Dr. Fitch, by counting 

 the number on a single leaf, the leaves on a branch, and the 

 branches on the tree, to contain the amazing number of 12,000,000. 

 Although this may strike one as a large number, yet few, if any, 

 have any approximate idea of what a million means. YV< re 

 I to count as rapidly as I could enunciate, simply naming the 

 figures in their order and connection, omitting repetition of 

 "hundred" and "thousand" where they occur — thus saying, 

 " nine-seven ly-three-four-eighty-one," instead of "nine hundred and 

 seventy-three thousand four hundred and eighty-one," and ron- 



[ Lord Walsingham baa r ila-d this estimate to three millio •« \ 



