ENTOMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS

Extract

We do not intend in this article to allude to the troubles that the members of the insect world endure in their ordiuary every day life,—to their difficulties in getting out of their old clothes when nature bids them change their dress; nor to the risks they run from countless enemies, many-legged, four-legged, two-legged and no-legged,—nor yet to the labors some have to sustain in laying up their bread for a rainy season. Nor is our title intended as the text on which to found a disquisition on the sufferings thet the genus homo has to eudure (not at the hands, but at the mouths and tails of the insect hosts) ever since that sad day when old Noah, at the advice of Archangel Gabriel (who ought to have known better) broke his word to the serpent. All of course know the legend, yet as Lord Macaulay often did for his erudite school-boy, so will we do, and repeat and give the story of the origin of all venomous anthropophagus insects. We have it from the veracious Turk, so none but a Russophile or an anti-Jingoist will doubt it, and entomologists know neither country nor politics (whatever else they may know).