Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/266

 that exists within the sphere of unaided vision. The smaller insects deposit eggs that are still more curious than those of the butterflies and moths. The egg of the lace-fly is like an unripe cherry with a long white transparent stem; that of the blowfly like a white cucumber with longitudinal stripes; and that deposited by the bug has been well compared to a circular game-pie with a standing crust, the lid of which is lifted when the young one makes its exit after hatching.

The microscope reveals many wonderful peculiarities of structure in the beings whose eggs we have just examined. The coloured dust of the butterfly's wing turns out to be feathery-scales of a tapering form, with deeply-cut notches at their broad end. The hairs of the bee are seen to be thickly beset with still finer hairs. The smallest fly is found to possess an elaborate pumping apparatus or trunk, compared with which the pumps constructed by man are clumsy and inefficient. The eyes of insects are composite, each visible eye being made up of thousands that are invisible; no less than twenty thousand of these minute organs have been detected by means of the microscope in the head of the hawk-moth. But our space is limited, and we dare not enter any further into the subject of insect anatomy.

The dust of the butterfly's wing is remarkable enough, but the fertilizing dust or pollen that covers the stamens of flowers, appears still more curious to