Nature's Militia 329 



their wings they usually want so little food, and that 

 of such a kind that no one can grudge it them. A 

 caterpillar eats leaves, for instance, and devours them 

 greedily, whereas a butterfly takes but a sip of nectar, 

 the loss of which is no injury to even the most delicate 

 flower. Yet, as the winged insects lay multitudes of 

 eggs, they cannot be called harmless, and some few of 

 them even do a good deal of eating on their own 

 account. Cockchafers, for example, eat leaves, and 

 sometimes strip whole woods, while their grubs devour 

 roots. Daddy-long-leg grubs (turnip-fly) are equally 

 destructive, and so terribly hardy that they thoroughly 

 deserve their name of leather-jackets. For they are 

 very little affected by weather, and may be frozen stiff, 

 or lie under water for a couple of days, and yet be just 

 as lively as ever afterwards. Insects, indeed, often 

 take a great deal of killing, and will live through frosts, 

 especially in the chrysalis-state, when the poor birds 

 perish by hundreds. 



As for the grub of the click-beetle, its very name is 

 enough to make a farmer shudder, for, as the wire- 

 worm, it is only too well known. For five whole years 

 it remains a grub, eating all the time. And it will eat 

 almost anything in the way of vegetable-food, turnips 

 as well as sprouting corn, or hops, and grass-roots as 

 well as any of these. Where the young corn is strong, 

 it will sometimes recover from having its first shoot 

 eaten off just below the ground, and will even send up 

 two or three shoots instead of one ; but when the plants 

 are weak, as they often are on light, chalky soil, there 

 the wire-worm destroys sometimes the half, and occa- 

 sionally the whole, of a crop. 



To help him in the perpetual war which has to be 



