spending the clover on the farm, and returning the refuse of the crop to the land; and if judiciously expended, with the right kind of stock, there would more material go back to the soil every year than was developed by Nature's process out of the soil; and by following that process, using the plant, using water wherever it can be obtained, we can make these lands bear crops as of old. But if the exigencies of the times require, if the markets of the country around us demand more, then, most assuredly, the material which we apply to the land must be the material which plants require, and in the very form in which they require it; and thus fertility will be the rule, and sterility will be the exception.

INSECTS AS FRIENDS TO MEN.

We are accustomed to consider insects only as pests, to be destroyed in the most speedy and effective manner. They feed on the seed we place in the soil; they consume the tender germ, and cut down the growing blade; they revel in the opening flower, or blight and ruin the ripening fruit; they burrow in the meadows, feeding on the roots of grass and grain, and change a promised harvest into dried and crippled leaf and stalk; they attack the forest, and cause destruction amid its most vigorous growth; they make their home in the choice selections of the garden and the park, and withered leaves and broken branches follow; they fill the air with their multitudinous forms, and annoy both bird and beast; they torment and poison even man, and cause painful disease and final death.

There is no evil of which they appear to be wholly innocent, in the view which we are naturally inclined to take of them.

But there is another side, seen by science and art, which commends them to our admiration, and to our care and protection. It is presented in the accompanying paper, copied from the Gentleman's Magazine, an English publication of rare merit. It is entitled,

OUR DEBT TO INSECTS.

BY GRANT ALLEN.

It has often occurred to me as a curious fact, when I have been watching the bees and butterflies in an English meadow of a summer morning, that no one should ever yet have adequately realized the full amount of human indebtedness to those bright and joyous little winged creatures. I do not mean our practical indebtedness to insects for honey and bees'-wax, silk and satin, cochineal and lacquer, or a hundred other such-like useful products: these, indeed, are many and valuable in their own way,

though far less so than the tribute we draw from most of the other great classes of animal life. But there is one debt we owe them so out of all proportion to their size and relative importance in the world, that it is strange it should so seldom meet with due recognition. Odd as it may sound to say so, I believe we owe almost entirely to insects the whole presence of color in nature, otherwise than green. Without them our world would be wanting in more than half the beautiful objects which give it its greatest æsthetic charm in the appreciative eyes of cultivated humanity. Of course, if insects had never been, the great external features of the world would still remain essentially the same. The earth sculpture that gives rise to mountains and valleys, downs and plains, glens and gorges, is wholly unconnected with these minute living agents; but all the smaller beauties of detail which add so much zest to our enjoyment of life and nature would be almost wholly absent, I believe, but for the long-continued æsthetic selection of the insect tribes for innumerable generations. We have all heard, over and over again, that the petals of flowers have been developed mainly by the action of bees and butterflies, and as a botanical truth this principle is now pretty generally accepted; but it may be worth while to reconsider the matter once more from the picturesque and artistic point of view by definitely asking ourselves, How much of beauty in the outer world do we owe to the perceptions, and especially to the colorsense, of the various insects?

If we could suddenly transplant ourselves from the gardens and groves of the nineteenth century into the midst of a carboniferous jungle on the delta of some forgotten Amazon or some primeval Nile, we should find ourselves surrounded by strange and somewhat monotonous scenery, very different from that of the varied and beautiful world in which we ourselves now live. The huge foliage of gigantic tree-ferns and titanic club-mosses would wave over our heads, while a green carpet of petty trailing creepers would spread luxuriantly over the damp soil beneath our feet. Great swampy flats would stretch around us on every side; and, instead of the rocky or undulating hills of our familiar Europe, we should probably see the interior country composed only of low ridges, unlifted as yet by the slow upheaval of ages into the Alps or Pyrenees of the modern continent. But the

most striking peculiarity of the scene would doubtless be the wearisome uniformity of its prevailing colors. Earth beneath and primitive trees overhead would all alike present a single field of unbroken and unvarying green. No scarlet flower, golden fruit, or gay butterfly would give a gleam of brighter and warmer coloring to the continuous verdure of that more than tropical forest. Green, and green, and green again: wherever the eye fell it would rest alike upon one monotonous and unrelieved mass of harsh and angular verdure.

On the other hand, if we turn to a modern English meadow, we find it bright with yellow buttercups and purple clover, pinktipped daisies and pale-faced primroses. We see the hedges white with may or glowing with dog-roses. We find the trees overhead covered with apple-blossom or scented with horsechestnut. While in and out among the beautiful flowers flit equally beautiful butterflies-emperors, admirals, peacocks, orange-tips, and painted ladies. The green of the grassy meadow and the blue of the open sky serve only as back-groundsto show off the brighter hues of the beautiful blossoms, and the insects that pay court to them incessantly.

To what is this great change in the general aspect of nature due? Almost entirely, we may now confidently conclude, to the color-sense in the insects themselves. The lovely tints of the summer flowers and the exquisite patterns on the butterfly's wings have alike been developed through the taste and the selective action of these humble little creatures. To trace up the gradual evolution of the insect color-sense and its subsequent reactions upon the outer world, we must go back to a time when neither flower nor butterfly yet existed.

In the carboniferous earth we have reason to believe that almost all the vegetation belonged to the flowerless type-the type now represented among us by ferns and horse-tails. These plants, as everybody knows, have no flowers, but only spores or naked frondlets. There were a few flowering plants, it is true, in the carboniferous world, but they belonged entirely to the group of conifers, trees like the pines and cycads, which bear their seeds in cones, and whose flowers would only be recognized as such by a technical botanist. Even if some stray archaic members of the true flowering groups already existed, it