United States or Japan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is immaterial to the student of instinct whether the animal have eight legs instead of six, or pulmonary sacs instead of air-tubes. Besides, the Araneida belong to the group of segmented animals, organized in sections placed end to end, a structure to which the terms 'insect' and 'entomology' both refer.
Samuel Lockwood, secretary of the New Jersey State Microscopical Society. His subject was the Wine Fly, Drosophila ampelophila. The paper was a contribution to the life-history of this minute insect. He had given in part three years to its study, beginning in September, 1881, when nothing whatever of its life-history seemed to have been known. In October the flies attacked his Concords.
Holding the thumb upright, so that the wasp stood upon a miniature tower, she pursed her lips entrancingly and blew the insect upon its way as gently as if borne upon a summer zephyr. "They only sting if you hurt them," she explained; "and so would you!"
Moreover, the defensive inlaying is slight; we see that the insect attaches no great importance to it and has every confidence in the stout wall of the home. The material of which the work is made at first suggests some rustic wax, much coarser than that of the Bumble-bees, or rather some tar of unknown origin.
This fact is surprising, and it is still more surprising that if the practical joke of removing the cricket is repeated several times in succession, the Sphex drags it anew every time to the entrance of the burrow and first descends alone; forty times over this experiment succeeded without the insect deciding to renounce the habitual manoeuvre.
The door is therefore closed against importunate callers, that is to say, the insect fills the entrance to the tunnel with his mound of rubbish. Having taken this precaution, he goes back again and sits down to his meal. He will not reopen his hiding-place nor remake the pit at the entrance until later, when the Cicada has been digested and hunger makes its reappearance.
The only apparent remedy for this evil is, to balance the disproportionate development of noxious foreign species by bringing from their native country the tribes which prey upon them. This, it seems, has been attempted. This is, however, not the only purpose for which man has designedly introduced foreign forms of insect life.
If any being star, or insect were separated utterly from Him, it would crumble into nothingness. But the appeal to Creation is singularly interrupted by an appeal to History. The prophet drops from the serene expanse of the silent yet eloquent heavens to the stormy scenes of changing dynasties and revolutions of earth's kingdoms. How calm the one, how tumultuous the other!
"How do you make that out? You're as complimentary as ever." "Everyone would be wanting to engage me as the great noxious weed-killer and poisonous insect exterminator if I made away with you," I answered. I gave him an invitation to take a scat with me, and accepting, he swung up with easy grace.
A shrill, familiar voice saluted me, and recalled me to days of boyhood; that of the insect called the "locust" by New England schoolboys, which was fast clinging among the heated boughs of the old pine trees. Then, too, as I passed the bushes, the low sound of falling water reached my ear.
Word Of The Day