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The bats flying about in the twilight have been regarded as birds; but a closer inspection shows that they belong to another class, and the notion bird must be limited. As already observed in the discussion of induction, most of our psychical notions are thus faulty and incomplete; e.g., the ideas fruit, fish, star, insect, mineral, ship, church, clock, dog, kitchen, library, lawyer, city, etc.
And it chances that evolution, or natural selection, or life's mechanism, or fate or a creator, has wrought them into form and function also in superlatives. Cicadas are supreme in longevity and noise. One of our northern species sucks in silent darkness for seventeen years, and then, for a single summer, breaks all American long-distance records for insect voices.
It was a great time for the spiders, those visible Deaths of the insect race.
The early date of their origin, the delicacy of their structure, and the peculiar form which their larval development has generally assumed, combine to obscure the evolution of the insect, and we must be content for the present with these general indications.
He says, Consider the lilies; look into the heavens; number the stars; go to the ant; be wise; ask the beasts, the fowl, the fishes; or "talk even to the earth, and it showeth thee." Every flower and star, rainbow and insect, was meant to be so provocative of thought that any man who never saw a human book might be largely educated.
In going down the throat the insect stung her on the tonsil. Great pain and inflammation followed, and in a short time there was complete deprivation of the power of speech. Mease relates the case of a corpulent farmer who, in July, 1835, was stung upon the temple by a common bee.
He was so great a lover of nature that, without any thought, but habitually, he always avoided treading unnecessarily on any plant; who knew what long-sought growth or insect might develop itself in what now appeared but insignificant? His steps led him in the direction of the ash-tree seat, much less screened from observation on this side than on the terrace.
But we find a great amount of variation in the tongue or sucker of moths, and in the silk moths the maxillæ are rudimentary, and there is no tongue, these organs being but little more developed than in the caterpillar. The maxillæ in this insect are minute, rudimentary, and of no service to the creature, which does not take food.
In the ordinary course of satisfying its hunger, this insect punctures the skin of a horse, and the animal dies in consequence. A fly makes a lunch, and a horse's life pays the price of the meal. This has ever seemed to me to represent the beast-of-prey principle in Nature more vigorously than any other fact.
She first warns us of her presence by the buzzing sound we know so well, and then settling upon her victim, thrusts into the quivering flesh five sharp organs, one of which is a delicate lancet. These organs, taken in one mass, are called the beak, or bill of the insect. A writer says: "The bill has a blunt fork at the end, and is apparently grooved.
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