NATURE STUDY. 
PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE 
Manchester Institute of Arts and Sciences. 
You. II. March, 1902. No. 10. 
Some Queer Sticks. I. 
BY EDWARD J. BURNHAM. 
There is always a fascination about a brook or pool. 
The artist-author, Du Maurier, understood this, and no 
doubt was influenced by both the instinct of art and a gen¬ 
uine love of nature when, in his “ Peter Ibbetson,” he had 
the two children, on their holiday afternoons, make eager 
pilgrimages to the dark pool in the wood to watch for the 
Dytiscus, the big water beetle, that often came boldly 
swimming out in sight of them, when they had waited pa¬ 
tiently. 
There is so much life in a brook; and a great part of it 
is so novel as to be almost uncanny. There are queer, 
squirming things that roll about, without legs, and look¬ 
ing like plump meal-bags, tied at one end. They will be 
real flies some day, with two gauzy wings, and will sport 
in the sunshine, with nothing about them to suggest that 
once they were such unseemly, footless grubs. There are 
the stone-fly nymphs, or young, sprawling on the under 
side of stones where the water flows rapidly; and in the 
pool below the rapids are the may-fly nymphs, with their 
graceful, undulating way of getting about, and with their 
