Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/574

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��Popular Science Monthly

��slits. When it is necessary to close the slits on account of rifle fire, the pilot gropes his way as best he may. The captain or lieutenant in command is the brains of the steel-clad caterpillar.

Caterpillars have fairly active brains and a good workable ganglia, or nerve center. On either side of the head they have small, shining eyes in rows. They also get good information about the nature of the surface over which they are passing by low- ering delicate filaments or sense organs known a s p a - pilli.

The British tank is a terror to the Teuton infantry as it starts relent- lessly over No Man's Land, crushing every- thing within its reach and mowing down the enemy. It brushes aside wire entangle- ments, shatters dugouts and

forts of reinforced concrete and slays cowering wretches in the trenches whose cries for mercy the men in the car of death cannot hear. What the tank is to modern battle, the caterpillar may well be in the wars of the insect world.

Imagine what a vision of frightfulness that hideous specimen of the larval state, the hickory-horned devil, would be to the human race, if he were enlarged to tank size, approximately eight feet wide and twenty-eight feet long! What a sight to make men's knees shake with fear, with his waving antennae, his fierce and gleaming jaws, his towering horns, his beady eyes, and his ponderous bulk! He would ignore all obstacles as he went trampling and devouring over the plain, his vertical mouth opening and shutting meanwhile like a ponderous valve.

In the realm of twigs and leaves, the cry "The Caterpillars are coming!" must mean as much as the alarm "The Tanks!

��B-raln

��Weapon

���Weapon

��Prolegs (Shoes)

��A tank and a caterpillar are first cousins. Notice the wonderful likeness in mechanical detail

��The Tanks!" means to the Germans. The caterpillar is not the inoffensive slug which he often seems to be as we look down upon him as he bestirs himself across some woodland walk. His hide is very thick, and underneath it is a heavy layer of fat. The doughty warrior ants coming out with their nippers to assail him, do not worry him much. Up goes the tank of the world underfoot, and

down he comes with a swing of the forward part of his body and a group of his enemies are crushed to extinction. Several varie- ties of cater- pillars have very effective weapons of of- fense. The spe- cies from which comes the swal- low-tail butter- fly mounts a rapid-fire poison-gas gun. When he is hard pressed by his enemies he will project from his head a tube which looks not unlike the barrel of a Lewis machine-gun, and dis- charge an odor so offensive that insects within scent of it curl up and die.

The camouflage of tanks and cater- pillars is effective always. "Old Crusty" at the western front and "Old Crawly," of the garden both resort to disguise. The tank is often painted the hue of the mire; the caterpillar assumes the tone of the soil.

There scarcely seems a characteristic, therefore, either of the fuzzy denizens of the foliage or of the monster military mechanisms which may turn the tide of this war, which does not reveal that, after all, the terrors of the terrain are caterpillars titanic.

It seems, after all, as though " there's nothing now under the sun." We copy the fish for submarines, the birds for airplanes, and now the tank is just a glorified caterpillar.

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