Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/102

 But the jungle is the paradise of the insects; there is every conceivable kind and then as many more that are beyond human belief: gigantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked as if they had been stencilled with the rainbow colors of the sun, and flies as numerous per square unit of space as grains of powder in the charge of an 8 gauge shell.

The ants, though, have all the other insects faded and everything else in the jungle that lives on the ground. Next to William Hohenzollern’s armies that devastated Belgium and Flanders rank the Amazon armies of ants that march out to seek what and whom they can devour. Everything from a jaguar on down that gets in their way becomes meat and drink for them.

You have, of course, often watched our little fireflies and wondered what kind of an apparatus was installed in their anatomy which produces the intermittent, phosphorescent light as they flit around. Well, down in Brazil there are fireflies that look like electric lights. They measure nearly 4 inches, long, and 1¾ inches wide and carry three light reservoirs—two in