THE ECONOMIC STATUS OF INSECTS AS A CLASS. 565 



said that we ought not to forget the remark of the Roman emperor 

 who said that the body of an enemy never tasted bad, and that the 

 banquet of the society would always lack something so long as there 

 was not placed before them at least some grasshopper farina and fried 

 white worms. 



A single insect, the honey bee, furnishes a notable article of food and 

 is the basis of a great and world-wide industry. 



As food for poultry, song birds, and food-fish insects are indirectly of 

 great benefit to man. Not only do they provide living food for such 

 animals, but Corixa mercenaria, a water bug, is now being imported by 

 the ton from Mexico into England as food for birds, poultry, game, and 

 fish. One ton of these bugs has been computed by Mr. Gr. W. Kirkaldy 

 to contain 250,000,000 of insects. 1 



In the days, of pure empiricism in medicine insects were used exten- 

 sively, and we have only to mention the Spanish fly to show that they 

 are still of some value. 



In the arts shellac and Chinese white wax, as is well known, are 

 insect products, as also are the formerly greatly used cochineal dye and 

 Polish berry dye, the so-called berry in this case being an insect and 

 not a berry. 



The last-named instances are all derived from scale insects, a group 

 of astonishing capacity for multiplication, the commercial possibilities 

 of which are by no means exhausted, as I took pleasure in showing in a 

 paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science in 1897. It should be noted here also that there is good rea- 

 son to believe that the manna of the Bible, upon which the Children of 

 Israel subsisted while in the wilderness, was also the secretion of a scale 

 insect. 



SUMMARY OF THE HABITS OF INSECTS. 



After this general account, arranged under the classes of damage and 

 classes of benefits brought about by insects, it will be well to attempt 

 an arrangement of the subject in a somewhat different manner in order 

 to gain, if possible, some light as to the relative proportion of insects 

 which are injurious or beneficial. 



It will be manifestly impossible to catalogue the species or the genera 

 in this way, and it will be obvious that a classification from families 

 will be lacking in exactness, since some of the families are very large 

 in number of species and others exceedingly small; but, taking the 

 groups as a whole, no better and speedier means suggests itself than 

 to summarize the habits by families. 



Another difficulty, however, which arises in such a classification is 

 the fact that some orders are in a much more advanced stage of classi- 

 fication than others, and the force which is given to a family as a 



1 Entomologists' Monthly Magazine, August, 1898. 



