The Life-Story of Insects Part 4

An equally familiar garden insect, the common 'Tiger' moth (_Arctia caia_) with its 'woolly bear' caterpillar, affords a life-cycle slightly differing from that of the 'Magpie.' The gaudy winged insects are seen in July and August, and lay their eggs on a great variety of plants. The larvae hatched from these eggs begin to feed at once, and having moulted once or twice and attained about half their full size, they rest through the winter, the dense hairy covering wherewith they are provided forming an effective protection against the cold. At the approach of spring they begin to feed again, and the fully-grown 'woolly bear' is a common object on garden paths in May and June. Before midsummer it has usually spun its yellow coc.o.o.n under some shelter on the ground and changed into a pupa.

Another modification with respect to seasonal change is shown by the Turnip moth (_Agrotis segetum_) and other allied Noctuidae (Owl-moths).

These are insects with brown-coloured wings, flying after dark in June.

The dull greyish larvae feed on many kinds of low-growing plants, usually hiding in the earth by day and wandering along the surface of the ground by night, biting off the farmer's ripening corn, or burrowing into his turnips or potatoes. On account of the burrowing habits of this insect it can feed throughout the winter, except when a hard frost puts a temporary stop to its activity. By April it has become fully grown and pupates in an earthen chamber a few inches below the surface. The Turnip moth in our countries is partially double-brooded, a minority of the autumn caterpillars growing more rapidly than their comrades so that they pupate, and a second brood of moths appear in September. These pair and lay eggs, the resulting caterpillars going as Barrett suggests (1896, vol. III. p. 291) 'to reinforce the great army of wintering larvae.'

Such underground caterpillars, to a great extent protected from cold, can continue to feed through the winter. With other species we find that the larva becomes fully grown in autumn, yet lives through the winter without further change. This is the case with the Codling moth (_Carpocapsa pomonella_), a well-known orchard pest, which in our countries is usually single-brooded. The moth is flying in May and lays her eggs on the shoots or leaves of apple-trees, more rarely on the fruitlets, into which however the caterpillar always bores by the upper (calyx) end. Here it feeds, growing with the growth of the fruit, feeding on the tissue around the cores, ultimately eating its way out through a lateral hole, and crawling upwards if its apple-habitation has fallen, downwards if it still remains on the bough, to shelter under a loose piece of bark where it spins its coc.o.o.n about midsummer and hibernates still in the larval condition. Not until spring is the pupal form a.s.sumed, and then it quickly pa.s.ses into the imaginal state. In the south of England, as F.V. Theobald (1909) has lately shown, and also in southwestern Ireland, this species may be double-brooded, the usual condition on the European continent and in the United States of America.

There the midsummer larvae pupate at once and the moths of an August brood lay eggs on the hanging or stored fruit; in this case, again, however, the full-grown larva, quickly fed-up within the developed apples, is the wintering stage.

Several of the insects mentioned in this survey, like the last-named codling moth, are occasionally double-brooded. As an example of the many Lepidoptera, which in our islands have normally two complete life-cycles in the year, we may take the very familiar White b.u.t.terflies (Pieris) of which three species are common everywhere. The appearance of the first brood of these b.u.t.terflies on the wing in late April or May is hailed as a sign of advanced spring-time. They pair and lay their eggs on cabbages and other plants, and the green hairy caterpillars feed in June and July, after which the spotted pupae may be found on fences and walls, attached by the silken tail-pad and supported by the waist-girdle. In August and September b.u.t.terflies of the second brood have emerged from these and are on the wing; their offspring are the autumn caterpillars which feed in some seasons as late as November, doing often serious damage to the late cruciferous crops before they pupate. The pupae may be seen during the winter months, waiting for the spring suns.h.i.+ne to call out the b.u.t.terflies whose structures are being formed beneath the hard cuticle.

Reviewing the small selection of life-stories of various Lepidoptera just sketched, we notice an interesting and suggestive variety in the wintering stage. The vanessid b.u.t.terflies hibernate as imagos; the 'vapourer' winters in the egg, the magpie as a young ungrown larva, the 'tiger' as a half-size larva; the Agrotis caterpillar feeds through the winter, growing all the time; the codling caterpillar completes its growth in the autumn, and winters as a full-size resting larva; lastly, the 'whites' hibernate in the pupal state. And in every case it is noteworthy that the form or habit of the wintering stage is well adapted for enduring cold.

Our native 'whites' afford ill.u.s.tration of another interesting feature often to be noticed in the life-story of double-brooded Lepidoptera. The b.u.t.terflies of the spring brood differ slightly but constantly from their summer offspring, affording examples of what is called _seasonal dimorphism_. All three species have whitish wings marked with black spots, larger and more numerous in the female than in the male. In the spring b.u.t.terflies these spots tend towards reduction or replacement by grey, while in the summer insects they are more strongly defined, and the ground colour of the wings varies towards yellowish. In the 'Green-veined' white (_Pieris napi_) the characteristic greenish-grey lines of scaling beneath the wings along the nervures, are much broader and more strongly marked in the spring than in the summer generation, whose members are distinguished by systematic entomologists under the varietal name _napaeae_. The two forms of this insect were discussed by A. Weismann in his cla.s.sical work on the Seasonal Dimorphism of b.u.t.terflies (1876). He tried the effect of artificially induced cold conditions on the summer pupae of _Pieris napi_, and by keeping a batch for three months at the temperature of freezing water, he succeeded in completely changing every individual of the summer generation into the winter form. The reverse of this experiment also was attempted by Weismann. He took a female of _bryoniae_, an alpine and arctic variety of _Pieris napi_, showing in an intensive degree the characters of the spring brood. This female laid eggs the caterpillars from which fed and pupated. The pupae although kept through the summer in a hothouse all produced typical _bryoniae_, and none of these with one exception appeared until the next year, for in the alpine and arctic regions this species is only single-brooded. Weismann experimented also with a small vanessid b.u.t.terfly, _Araschnia levana_, common on the European continent, though unknown in our islands, which is double (or at times treble) brooded, its spring form (_levana_) alternating with a larger and more brightly coloured summer form (_prorsa_). Here again by refrigerating the summer pupae, b.u.t.terflies were reared most of which approached the winter pattern, but it was impossible by heating the winter pupae to change _levana_ into _prorsa_. Experiments with North American dimorphic species have given similar results. Weismann argued from these experiments that the winter form of these seasonally dimorphic species is in all cases the older, and that the b.u.t.terflies developing within the summer pupae can be made to revert to the ancestral condition by repeating the low-temperature stimulus which always prevailed during the geologically recent Ice Age. On the other hand, a high temperature stimulus applied to one generation of the winter pupae cannot induce the change into the summer pattern, which has been evolved still more recently by slow stages, as the continental climate has become more genial. In tropical countries where instead of an alternation of winter and summer, alternate dry and rainy seasons prevail, somewhat similar seasonal dimorphism has been observed among many b.u.t.terflies. Not a few forms of Precis, an African and Indian genus allied to our Vanessa, that had long been considered distinct species are now known, thanks to the researches of G.A.K. Marshall (1898), to be alternating seasonal forms of the same insect. The offspring when adult does not closely resemble the parent; its appearance is modified by the climatic environment of the pupa. The experiments of Weismann just sketched in outline show at least that the same principle holds for our northern b.u.t.terflies.

We are thus led to see from the life-story of such insects, that the course of the story is not rigidly fixed; the creature in its various stages is plastic, open to influence from its surroundings, capable of marked change in the course of generations. And so the seasonal changes in the history of the individual from egg to imago point us to changes in the age-long history of the race.

CHAPTER IX

PAST AND PRESENT; THE MEANING OF THE STORY

In the previous chapter we recognised how the seasonal changes in various species of b.u.t.terflies as observable in two or three generations, indicate changes in the history of the race as it might be traced through innumerable generations. The endless variety in the form and habits of insect-larvae and their adaptations to various modes of life, which have been briefly sketched in this little book, suggest vaster changes in the cla.s.s of insects, as a whole, through the long periods of geological time. Every student of life, influenced by the teaching of Charles Darwin (1859) and his successors, now regards all groups of animals from the evolutionary standpoint, and believes that comparisons of facts of structure and life-history of orders and cla.s.ses evidently akin to each other, furnish at least some indications of the course of development in the greater systematic divisions, even as the facts of seasonal dimorphism, mentioned in the last chapter, give hints as to the course of development in those restricted groups that we call species or varieties. A brief discussion of the main outlines of the life-story of insects in the wide, evolutionary sense may thus fitly conclude this book.

In the first place we turn to the 'records' of those rocks, in whose stratified layers[12] are entombed remains, often fragmentary and obscure, of the insects of past ages of the earth's history. Compared with the thousands of extinct types of hard-sh.e.l.led marine animals, such as the Mollusca, fossil insects are few, as could only be expected, seeing that insects are terrestrial and aerial creatures with slight chance of preservation in sediments formed under water. Yet a number of insect remains are now known to naturalists, who are, in this connection, more particularly indebted to the researches of S.H. Scudder (1885), C. Brongniart (1894), and A. Handlirsch (1906).

[12] See Table of Geological Systems, p. 123.

We are now considering insects from the standpoint of their life-histories, and the individual life-story of an insect of which we possess but a few fragments of wings or body, entombed in a rock formed possibly before the period of the Coal Measures, can only be a matter of inference. Still it may safely be inferred that when the structure of these remains clearly indicates affinity to some existing order or family, the life-history of the extinct creature must have resembled, on the whole, that of its nearest living allies. And all the fossil insects known can be either referred to existing orders, or shown to indicate definite relations.h.i.+p to some existing group.

Pa.s.sing over some doubtful remains of Silurian age, we find in rocks usually regarded as Devonian[13] the most ancient fossils that can be certainly referred to the insects, while from beds of the succeeding Carboniferous period, a number of insect remains have been disinterred.

These Palaeozoic insects were frequently of large size, and they show distinct affinities with our recent may-flies, dragon-flies, stone-flies, and c.o.c.kroaches. In the Permian period, the latest of the divisions of the Palaeozoic, lived Eugereon, an insect with hemipteroid jaws and orthopteroid wings. All these insects must have been exopterygote in their life-history, if we may trust the indications of affinity furnished by their structure. In the Mesozoic period, however, insects with complete transformations must have been fairly abundant.

Rocks of Tria.s.sic age have yielded beetles and lacewing-flies, while from among Jura.s.sic fossils specimens have been described as representing most of our existing orders, including Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and Diptera. In Cainozoic rocks fossil insects of nearly six thousand species have been found, which are easily referable to existing families and often to existing genera. We may conclude then, imperfect though our knowledge of extinct insects is, that some of the most complex of insect life-stories were being worked out before the dawn of the Cainozoic era. Some instructive hints as to differences in the rate of change among different insect groups may be drawn from the study of parasites. For example, V.L. Kellogg (1913) points out that an identical species of the Mallophaga (Bird-lice) infests an Australian Ca.s.sowary and two of the South American Rheas; while two species of the same genus (Lipeurus) are common to the African Ostrich and a third kind of South American Rhea. These parasites must have been inherited unchanged by the various members of these three families of flightless birds from their common ancestors, that is from early Cainozoic times at latest. On the other hand, the various kinds of such highly specialised parasites as the warble-flies of the oxen and deer, must have become differentiated during those later stages of the Cainozoic period which witnessed the evolution of their respective mammalian hosts.

[13] The 'Little River' beds of St John, New Brunswick, Canada, by some modern geologists however considered as Carboniferous.

The foregoing brief outline of our knowledge of the geological succession of insects shows that the exopterygote preceded, in time, the endopterygote type of life-history. We have already seen that those insects undergoing little change in the life-cycle, and with visible, external wing-rudiments, are on the whole less specialised in structure than those which pa.s.s through a complete transformation. These two considerations, taken together, suggest strongly that in the evolution of the insect cla.s.s, the simpler life-history preceded the more complex.

Such a conclusion seems reasonable and what might have been expected, but we are confronted with the difficulty that if the most highly organised insects pa.s.s through the most profound transformations, then insects present a remarkable and puzzling exception to the general rules of development among animals, as has already been pointed out in the first chapter of this volume (p. 7). A few students of insect transformation have indeed supposed that the crawling caterpillar or maggot must be regarded as a larval stage which recalls the worm-like nature of the supposed far-off ancestors of insects generally. Even in Poulton's cla.s.sical memoir (1891, p. 190), this view finds some support, and it may be hard to give up the seductive idea that the worm-like insect-larva has some phylogenetic meaning. But the weight of evidence, when we take a comprehensive survey of the life-story of insects, must be p.r.o.nounced to be strongly in favour of the view put forward by Brauer (1869), and since supported by the great majority of naturalists who have discussed the subject, that the caterpillar or the maggot is itself a specialised product of the evolutionary process, adapted to its own particular mode of larval life.

The explanation of insect transformation is, in brief, to be found in an increasing amount of divergence between larva and imago. The most profound metamorphosis is but a special type of growth, accompanied by successive castings and renewings of the chitinous cuticle, which envelopes all arthropods. In the simplest type of insect life-story, there is no marked difference in form between the newly-hatched young and the adult, and in such cases we find that the young insect lives in the same way as the adult, has the same surroundings, eats the same food. This is the rule (see Chapters II and III) with the Apterygota, the Orthoptera, and most of the Hemiptera. In the last-named order, however, we find in certain families marked divergence between larva and imago, for example in the cicads, whose larvae live underground, while in the coccids, whose males are highly specialised and females degraded, there succeeds to the larva--very like the young stage in allied families--a resting instar, which in the case of the male, suggests comparison with the pupa of a moth or beetle.

Turning to the stone-flies, dragon-flies and may-flies, whose life-stories have been sketched in Chapter IV, we find that the early stages are pa.s.sed in water, whence before the final moult, the insects emerge to the upper air. Except for the possession of tufted gills, adapting them to an aquatic life, the stone-fly nymphs differ but slightly from the adults; the grubs of the dragon-flies and may-flies, however, are markedly different from their parents. In connection with these comparisons, it is to be noted that the dragon-flies and may-flies are more highly specialised insects than stone-flies, divergent specialisation of the adult and larva is therefore well ill.u.s.trated in these groups, which nevertheless have, like the Hemiptera and Orthoptera, visible external wing-rudiments.

From the vast array of insects that show internal wing-growth and a true pupal stage, a few larval types were chosen for description in Chapter VI, and a review of these suggests again the thought of increasing divergence between larva and imago. Reference has been made previously to the many instances in which the former has become pre-eminently the feeding, and the latter the breeding stage in the life-cycle. It seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the active, armoured campodeiform grub differing less from its parent than an eruciform larva differs from its parent, is as a larval type more primitive than the caterpillar or maggot. A. Lameere has indeed, while admitting the adaptive character of insect larvae generally, argued (1899) with much ingenuity that the eruciform or vermiform type must have been primitive among the Endopterygota, believing that the original environment of the larvae of the ancestral stock of all these insects must have been the interior of plant tissues. He is thus forced to the necessity of suggesting that the campodeiform larvae of ground-beetles or lacewings must be regarded as due to secondarily acquired adaptations; 'they resemble Thysanura and the larvae of Heterometabola only as whales resemble fishes.' There are two considerations which render these theories untenable. The Neuroptera and Coleoptera among which campodeiform larvae are common, are less specialised than Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Diptera, in which they are unknown. And among the Coleoptera which as we have seen (pp. 50 _f._) display a most interesting variety of larval structure, the legless, eruciform larva characterises families in which the imago shows the greatest specialisation, while in the same life-story, as in the case of the oil-beetles (pp. 56-7), the newly-hatched grub may be campodeiform, changing to the eruciform type as soon as it finds itself within reach of its host's rich store of food.

A certain amount of difficulty may be felt with regard to the theory of divergent evolution between imago and larva, in the case of those insects with complete transformation whose grubs and adults live in much the same conditions. By turning over stones the naturalist may find ground-beetles in company with the larvae of their own species. On the leaves of a willow tree he may observe leaf-beetles (Phyllodecta and Galerucella) together with their grubs, all greedily eating the foliage; or lady-bird beetles (Coccinella) and their larvae hunting and devouring the 'greenfly.' All of these insects are, however, Coleoptera, and the adult insects of this order are much more disposed to walk and crawl and less disposed to fly than other endopterygote insects. Their heavily armoured bodies and their firm s.h.i.+eld-like forewings render them less aerial than other insects; in many genera the power of flight has been altogether lost. It is not surprising, therefore, that many beetles, even when adult, should live as their larvae do; since the acquirement of complete metamorphosis they have become modified towards the larval condition, and an extreme case of such modification is afforded by the wingless grub-like female Glow-worm (Lampyris).

With most insects, however, the larva must be regarded as the more specially modified, even if degraded, stage. Miall (1895) has pointed out that the insect grub is not a precociously hatched embryo, like the larvae of mult.i.tudes of marine animals, but that it exhibits in a modified form the essential characters of the adult. Comparison for example can be readily made between the parts of the caterpillar and the b.u.t.terfly, whose story was sketched in the first chapter of this book, widely different though caterpillar and b.u.t.terfly may appear at a superficial glance. And the survey of variety in form, food, and habit of insect larvae given in Chapter VI enforces surely the conclusion that the larva is eminently plastic, adaptable, capable of changing so as to suit the most diverse surroundings. In a most suggestive recent discussion on the transformation of insects P. Deegener (1909) has claimed that the larva must be regarded as the more modified stage, because while all the adult's structures are represented in the larva, even if only as imaginal buds, there are commonly present in the larva special adaptive organs not found in the imago, for example the pro-legs of caterpillars or the skin-gills of midge-grubs. The correspondence of parts in b.u.t.terfly and caterpillar just referred to, may still be traced, though less easily, in bluebottle and maggot. The latter is an extreme example of degenerative evolution, and its contrast with the elaborately organised two-winged fly marks the greatest divergence observable between the larva and imago. With this divergence the resting pupal stage, during which more or less dissolution and reconstruction of organs goes on, becomes a necessity, and it has already been pointed out how the amount of this reconstruction is greatest where the divergence between the larval and perfect stages is most marked. Whatever differences of opinion may prevail on points of detail, the general explanation of insect metamorphosis as the result of divergent evolution in the two active stages of the life-story must a.s.suredly be accepted.

No other explanation accords with the increasing degree of divergence to be observed as we pa.s.s from the lower to the higher insect orders.

The successive incidents of the life-story of most insects are largely connected with the acquisition of wings. Wings, and the power of flight wherewith they endow their possessors, are evidently beneficial to the race in giving power of extending the range during the breeding period and thus ensuring a wide distribution of the eggs. In no case are wings fully developed until the closing stage of the insect's life, they are always acquired after hatching or birth. We have already noticed (p. 40) how Sharp (1899) has laid stress on the essential difference between the exopterygote and endopterygote insects, the wing-rudiments of the former growing outwards throughout life while those of the latter remain hidden until the pupal instar. Sharp considers that there is some difficulty in bridging, in thought, the gap between these two methods of wing-growth, and has put forward an ingenious suggestion to meet it (1902). Reference has already been made to insects of various orders in which one s.e.x is wingless, the Vapourer Moth (p. 96) for example, or all the individuals of both s.e.xes are wingless, as the aberrant c.o.c.kroaches mentioned in Chapter II (p. 15), or certain generations of virgin females are wingless, for example aphids (pp. 18-19) and gall-flies (pp. 94-5).

Insects may thus become secondarily wingless, that is to say be manifestly the offspring of winged parents, and such wingless forms may on the other hand give rise to offspring or descendants with well-developed wings. Frequently, as in the case of the aphids, many wingless generations intervene between two winged generations. A striking ill.u.s.tration of this fact is afforded by an aquatic bug, _Velia currens_, commonly to be seen skating over the surface of running water.

The adults of Velia are nearly always wingless, but now and then the naturalist meets with a specimen provided with functional wings, the possession of which enables the insect to make its way to a fresh stream. Moreover there are whole orders of parasitic insects, such as the lice and fleas, which, showing clear affinity to orders of winged insects, are believed to be secondarily wingless. These orders are designated by Sharp 'Anapterygota.' And from the a.n.a.logy of the periodic loss and recovery of wings in various generations of the same species, he has concluded that the gap between the exopterygote and the endopterygote method of development may have been bridged by an anapterygote condition; that the ancestors of those insects with complete transformations were the wingless descendants of primitive insects which grew their wings from visible external rudiments, and that in later times re-acquiring wings, they developed these organs in a new way, from inwardly directed rudiments or imaginal buds.

This theory of Sharp's is original, daring, and ingenious, but the loss and re-acquisition of wings which it presupposes is difficult to imagine in large groups during a prolonged evolutionary history, while the sudden appearance of a totally new mode of wing-growth in the offspring of wingless insects would be an extreme example of discontinuity in development.

On the whole the most probable suggestion which can be made as to the origin of 'complete' transformation in insects is that the instar in which wings were first visible externally became later and later in the course of the evolution of the more highly organised groups. In this way a gradual transition from the exopterygote to the endopterygote type of life-story is at least conceivable. It will be remembered that a may-fly (p. 33) undergoes a moult after acquiring functional wings, emerging into the air as a 'sub-imago.' In not a few endopterygote insects, the pupa shows more or less activity, swimming through water intermittently (gnats) or just before the imago has to emerge (caddis-flies); working its way out of the ground (crane-flies) or coming half-way out of its coc.o.o.n (many moths). The pupa of the higher insects almost certainly corresponds with the may-fly's sub-imago, and the facts just recalled as to remnants of pupal activity suggest that in the ancestors of endopterygote insects what is now the pupal instar was represented by an active nymphal or sub-imaginal stage, possibly indeed by more than one stage, as Packard and other writers have stated that pupae of bees and wasps undergo two or three moults before the final exposure of the imago. Such an early pupal instar has been defined as a 'pro-nymph' or a 'semi-pupa.' Examples have been given of the exceptional pa.s.sive condition of the penultimate instar in Exopterygota. The instars preceding this presumably had originally outward wing-rudiments in all insect life-histories, and the endopterygote condition was attained by the postponement of the outward appearance of these to successively later stages. The leg and wing rudiments of the male coccid (pp. 20-1) beneath the cuticle of the second instar are strictly comparable to imaginal buds, and these are present in one instar of what is generally regarded as an exopterygote life-history. The first instar in all insects has no visible wing-rudiments, but when they grow outwardly from the body, they necessarily become covered with cuticle, so that they must be visible after the first moult. There is no supreme difficulty in supposing that the important change was for these early rudiments to become sunk into the body, so that the cuticle of the second, and, later, of the third and succeeding instars, showed no outward sign of their presence. This suggestion is confirmed by Heymons' (1896, 1907) observation of the occasional appearance of outward wing-rudiments on the thoracic segments of a mealworm, the larva of the beetle _Tenebrio molitor_, and by F. Silvestri's discovery (1905) of a 'pro-nymph' stage with short external wing-rudiments between the second larval and the pupal instars of the small ground-beetle _Lebia scapularis_. Whatever may be the exact explanation of these abnormalities, they show that in the life-story of the higher insects outward wing-rudiments may even yet appear before the pupal stage, confirming our belief that such appearance is an ancestral character. The inward growth of these wing-rudiments may well have been correlated with a difference in form between the newly-hatched insect and its parent. As this difference persisted until a constantly later stage, and the pre-imaginal instar became necessarily a stage for reconstruction, the present condition of complete metamorphosis in the more highly organised orders was finally attained.

To explain satisfactorily these complex life-stories is however admittedly a difficult task. The acquisition of wings is, as we have seen, a dominating feature in them all, but if we try to go yet a step farther back and speculate on the origin of wings in the most primitive exopterygote insects, the task becomes still more difficult. Many years ago Gegenbaur (1878) was struck by the correspondence of insect wings to the tracheal gills of may-fly larvae, which are carried on the abdominal segments somewhat as wings are on the thoracic segments. But Borner has recently (1909) brought forward evidence that these abdominal gills really correspond serially with legs. Moreover Gegenbaur's theory suggests that the ancestral insects were aquatic, whereas the presence of tubes for breathing atmospheric air in well-nigh all members of the cla.s.s, and the fact that aquatic adaptations, respiratory and otherwise, in insect-larvae are secondary force the student to regard the ancestral insects as terrestrial. It is indeed highly probable that insects had a common origin with aquatic Crustacea, but all the evidence points to the ancestors of insects having become breathers of atmospheric air before they acquired wings. How the wings arose, what function their precursors performed before they became capable of supporting flight, we can hardly even guess.

Our study of the life-story of insects, therefore, while it has taught us something of what is going on around us to-day, and has given us hints of the course of a few threads of that long life-story which runs through the ages, brings us face to face with the most instructive, if humbling fact that 'there are many more things of which we are ignorant.' The pa.s.sage from creeping to flight, as the caterpillar becomes transformed into the b.u.t.terfly, was a mystery to those who first observed it, and many of its aspects remain mysterious still. Perhaps the most striking result of the study of insect transformation is the appreciation of the divergent specialisation of larva and imago, and it is a suggestive thought that of the two the larva has in many cases diverged the more from the typical condition. The caterpillar crawling over the leaf, or the fly-grub swimming through the water, may thus be regarded as a creature preparing for a change to the true conditions of its life. It is a strange irony that the preparation is often far longer than the brief hours of achievement. But the light which research has thrown on the nature of these wonderful life-stories, the demonstration of the unseen presence and growth within the insect, during its time of preparation among strange surroundings, of the organs required for service in the coming life amid its native air, confirm surely the intuition of the old-time students, who saw in these changes, so familiar and yet so wonderful, a parable and a prophecy of the higher nature of man.

OUTLINE CLa.s.sIFICATION OF INSECTS

Cla.s.s INSECTA or HEXAPODA.

Sub-cla.s.s A, APTERYGOTA.

Order 1. _Thysanura_ (Bristle-tails).

2. _Collembola_ (Spring-tails).

Sub-cla.s.s B, EXOPTERYGOTA.

Order 1. _Dermaptera_ (Earwigs).

2. _Orthoptera_ (c.o.c.kroaches, Gra.s.shoppers, Crickets).

3. _Plecoptera_ (Stone-flies).

4. _Isoptera_ (Termites or 'White Ants').

5. _Corrodentia_ (_a_) _Copeognatha_ (Book-lice).

(_b_) _Mallophaga_ (Biting-lice).

6. _Ephemeroptera_ (May-flies).

7. _Odonata_ (Dragon-flies).

8. _Thysanoptera_ (Thrips).

9. _Hemiptera_ (_a_) _Heteroptera_ (Bugs, Pond-skaters) (_b_) _h.o.m.optera_ (Cicads, 'Greenfly,' Scales).

10. _Anoplura_ (Lice).

Sub-cla.s.s C, ENDOPTERYGOTA.

Order 1. _Neuroptera_ (Alder-flies, Ant-lions, Lacewings).

2. _Coleoptera_ (Beetles).

3. _Mecaptera_ (Scorpion-flies).

4. _Trichoptera_ (Caddis-flies).

5. _Lepidoptera_ (Moths and b.u.t.terflies).

6. _Diptera_ (Two-winged flies) (_a_) _Orthorrhapha_ (Crane-flies, Midges, Gnats) (_b_) _Cyclorrhapha_ (Hover-flies, House-flies, Bot-flies, &c).