Absent Insects On the subject of spiders—one is not allowed
to call them ihseets for the wholly inadeepiate reason' that they possess eight legs instead of six, and ought to be called crabs : they are not of course inseeta, but may they not be insects ? We need a general word for the small fauna, among which spiders are almost the most numerous. Insect-eating birds are birds that eat spiders as well as flies, beetles,' grubs 'and what not. It has been a surprising season for insects, in the largest sense of the term. Some species are rather few ; but others have multiplied altogether beyond the normal, especially ants, crickets and two or three species of moth. The most charac- teristic and beautiful of autumnal butterflies have scarcely been seen. Our buddleias have lured no peacocks or red admirals, or few at the most. Our few plums have been free from the molestatiOns of wasps ; and our own wrists and ankles less irritated by the midge or the harvest bug. Yet the towns have been invaded by hundreds of ants on their marriage flight, and Kent has suffered a plague of the field cricket. This last is one of the few insects that has more interested men of letters than the rural dweller : the Kent people, worried beyond patience by the sharp ventriloquial note, that carries far like a hooter, would perhaps not endorse Keats' enthusiasm for this witness to the long continuance of summer. His cricket, not his grasshopper (of the same sonnet) has been the burden.
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