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bluebottle, whereas the law protects the other creature. The bluebottle, however, adds to his other objectionablenesses by plunging among and rolling in your meals before your very eyes.

The Pirate and the Death's-Head.

The Death Watch is another domestic insect never very cordially received. He only taps by way of telegraphic signal to his friends, but after all the terror he has caused he might have had the consideration to invent some other system. The Death-Watch, the Death's-Head-Moth, and the Pirate Spider are the banditti among insects—who are all cut-throats themselves to begin with.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of insects as a class is their contempt for legs. No insect minds the loss of a leg or two, having so many others. A spider sometimes will get along very well with one. Indeed, every insect would seem to be made of parts which are complete strangers to each other. I have seen a wasp "divided," like Clonglocketty Angus McClan, "close by the waist," but not in the least inconvenienced by the solution of continuity. The front half, having the best of the bargain by reason of retaining the wings and legs, strolled away in the most unconcerned fashion, leaving the unfortunate abdomen, legless and wingless, to get home as best it might. Whereon one might construct yet another fable, relating the meeting of the front end of that wasp with an enemy, and its inability to use its sting at a critical moment, with the moral, Never Despise even a Deserted Abdomen. Wasps, by the way, are not social favourites. I have seen an ordinarily companionable man, not otherwise given to physical exercise, climb fatiguingly, and grovel painfully by way of excusing himself from making a wasp's closer acquaintance. And when a wasp succeeds in making a visit, alighting on a man's hand or neck, that man never asks him to sit down, because it is when a wasp sits down that one best understands the uselessness of his acquaintance. The only satisfactory way of averting a wasp-sting is to stand on the animal's back for five minutes before he commences.

A Review.

The domestic black-beetle is so called in celebration of its being brown in colour and not a beetle. Beetles are aristocrats who keep their wings in sheaths. The more proper name for Blatta Orientalis is the cockroach, because it is equally