CHAPTER VIIL 

 FIELD WORK ON ORTHOPTERA. 



If the school-house is near fields and farm lands, 

 the study of insects is easy; but trolley car or steam car, 

 or wagons may be utilized for putting one's self in touch 

 with regions where insects of many kinds live and work. 

 A dead insect is not so profitable for study as is an insect 

 alive; the most interesting facts of the insect's everyday 

 living are lacking if you take the insect out of its natural 

 surroundings. Hence there must grow upon the student 

 of insects the habit of observing what is going on about 

 him in places where insects live, what the insects are 

 doing, and whether any other living being, plant or 

 insect or man, is the gainer thereby. 



The food-getting instinct is at work in the will of the 

 grasshopper when he eats up our lawn grasses and 

 shrubbery; and it is a successful insect from the grass- 

 hopper point of view, though not valuable from the 

 human point of view at all. Some knowledge will 

 already be in possession of the students as to where to 

 go to look for hoppers and crickets. Sunny hedge rows; 

 hot dusty roads; late garden patches — all should be 

 visited for grasshoppers and locusts. 



Discover : 



Whether their colors are protective so far as you are 

 concerned. 



Whether they have any enemies besides yourself. 

 Whether they sing at this time of day, 



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