No man has ever sung of spiders or earwigs or any other of our pet
antipathies among the insects like that. The moth is the only one of
the insects that fascinates us with both its beauty and its terror.

I doubt if there have ever been greater hordes of insects in this
country than during the past spring. It is the only complaint one has
to make against the sun. He is a desperate breeder of insects. And he
breeds them not in families like a Christian but in plagues. The
thought of the insects alone keeps us from envying the tropics their
blue skies and hot suns. Better the North Pole than a plague of
locusts. We fear the tarantula and have no love for the tse-tse fly.
The insects of our own climate are bad enough in all conscience. The
grasshopper, they say, is a murderer, and, though the earwig is a
perfect mother, other insects, such as the burying-beetle, have the
reputation of parricides, But, dangerous or not, the insects are for
the most part teasers and destroyers. The greenfly makes its colonies
in the rose, a purple fellow swarms under the leaves of the apples,
and another scoundrel, black as the night, swarms over the beans.
There are scarcely more diseases in the human body than there are
kinds of insects in a single fruit tree. The apple that is rotten
before it is ripe is an insect's victim, and, if the plums fall green
and untimely in scores upon the ground, once more it is an insect that
has been at work among them. Talk about German spies! Had German spies
gone to the insect world for a lesson, they might not have been the
inefficient bunglers they showed themselves to be. At the same time,
most of us hate spies and insects for the same reason. We regard them
as noxious creatures intruding where they have no right to be, preying
upon us and giving us nothing but evil in return. Hence our
ruthlessness. We say: "Vermin," and destroy them. To regard a human