CHAPTER VI
Insects in Britain—Meadow ants—The indoor view of insect life—Insects in visible nature—The humming-bird hawk-moth and the parson lepidopterist—Rarity of death's-head moth—Hawk-moth and meadow-pipit—Silver-washed fritillaries on bracken—Flight of the white admiral butterfly—Dragon-flies—Want of English names—A water-keeper on dragon-flies—Moses Harris—Why moths have English names—Origin of the dragon-fly's bad reputation—Cordulegaster annulatus—Calopteryx virgo—Dragon-flies congregated—Glow-worm—Firefly and glow-worm compared—Variability in light—The insect's attitude when shining—Supposed use of the light—Hornets—A long-remembered sting—The hornet local in England—A splendid insect—Insects on ivy blossoms in autumn.
The successive Junes, Julys, and Augusts spent in this low-lying, warm forest country have served to restore in my mind the insect world to its proper place in the scheme of things. In recent years, in this northern land, it had not seemed so important a place as at an earlier period of my life in a country nearer to the sun. Our insects, less numerous, smaller in size, more modest in colouring, and but rarely seen in swarms and clouds and devastating multitudes, do not force themselves on our attention, as is the case in many other regions of the earth. Here, for instance, where I am writing this chapter, there is a stretch of flat, green, common land by the Test, and on this clouded afternoon, at the end of summer, while sitting on one of the innumerable little green hillocks covering the common, it seemed to me that I was in a vacant place where animal life had ceased to be. Not an insect hummed in that quiet, still atmosphere, not could I see one tiny form on the close-cropped turf at my feet. Yet I was sitting on one of their populous habitations. Cutting out a section of the cushion-like turf of grass and creeping thyme that covered the hill and made it fragrant, I found the loose, dry earth within teeming with minute yellow ants, and many of the hillocks around were occupied by thousands upon thousands of the same species. Indeed, I calculated that in a hundred square yards at that spot the ant inhabitants alone numbered not less than about two hundred thousand.
The unregarded tribes
It is partly on account of this smallness and secretiveness of most of our insects—of our seeing so little of insect life generally except during the summer heats in a few favourable localities—and partly an effect of our indoor life, that we think and care so little about them. The important part they play, if it is taught us, fades out of knowledge: we grow in time to regard them as one of the superfluities in which nature abounds despite the ancient saying to the contrary. Or worse, as nothing but pests. What good are they to us indeed! Very little. The silk-worm and the honey-bee have been in a measure domesticated, and rank with, though a long way after, our cattle, our animal pets and poultry. But wild insects! There is the turnip-fly, and the Hessian-fly, and botfly, and all sorts of worrying, and blood-sucking, and disease-carrying flies, in and out of houses; and gnats and midges, and fleas in seaside lodgings, and wasps, and beetles, such as the cockchafer and blackbeetle—are not all these pests? This is the indoor mind—its view of external nature—which makes the society of indoor people unutterably irksome to me, unless (it will be understood) when I meet them in a house, in a town, where they exist in some sort of harmony, however imperfect, with their artificial environment.
Insects in visible nature
I am not concerned now with the question of the place which insects occupy in the scale of being and their part in the natural economy, but solely with their effect on the nature-lover with or without the "curious mind"—in fact, with insects as part of this visible and audible world. Without them, this innumerable company that, each "deep in his day's employ," are ever moving swiftly or slowly about me, their multitudinous small voices united into one deep continuous Æolian sound, it would indeed seem as if some mysterious malady or sadness had come upon nature. Rather would I feel them alive, teasing, stinging, and biting me; rather would I walk in all green and flowery places with a cloud of gnats and midges ever about me. Nor do I wish to write now about insect life generally: my sole aim in this chapter is to bring before the reader some of the most notable species seen in this place—those which excel in size or beauty, or which for some other reason are specially attractive. For not only is this corner of Hampshire most abounding in insect life, but here, with a few exceptions, the kings and nobles of the tribe may be met with.
Merely to see these nobler insects as one may see them here, as objects in the scene, and shining gems in nature's embroidery, is a delight. And here it may be remarked that the company of the entomologist is often quite as distasteful to me out of doors as that of the indoor-minded person who knows nothing about insects except that they are a "nuisance." Entomologist generally means collector, and his—the entomologist's—admiration has suffered inevitable decay, or rather has been starved by the growth of a more vigorous plant—the desire to possess, and pleasure in the possession of, dead insect cases.
The parson lepidopterist