The ancestors of some of the creatures pictured in this book were buried in the transparent amber of the Baltic many thousands of years ago and the fossil remains of others date back a million years or more, but while man has been developing his surroundings from the primitive ones of savagery to the almost inconceivably complicated ones of civilized life, these creatures, most of them at least, seem to be leading essentially the same kind of lives that they led hundreds of thousands of years ago. They have powers which neither man nor any other mammal ever dreamed of having. Some have powers of flight which enable them to sail a thousand miles before the wind. Others can jump a hundred times their own length. One of these monsters can manufacture a liquid rope as easily as mammals produce milk and with it weave aerial nets to trap their prey or, by attaching it, can drop from the dizziest heights without danger, and when the rope has served its purpose they eat it up. Their weapons of defense are comparable to the deadly ones that only poisonous serpents have. If they were larger they would be, in fact, what legend pictures the dragons to have been. The unthinkably old germ plasm of these species produces creatures which act with a precision of purpose and a degree of absolute self-sacrifice which cannot fail to stagger the most conscientious of the human race. They might even make one wonder whether the fulfillment of biological life does not consist in sacrifice of the individual for the good of the species to which it belongs. Certain it is, that human thought is now drifting away from the consideration of the individual and is coming to pay more attention to the species and the things which affect its development. This is a picture book produced in the playtime hours of two busy people. It is a collection of actual photographs of a few of the small-sized monsters which inhabit the tall grass, the flower garden and vegetable garden, the pines and oaks of a place in the woods of Maryland. If it should show to others a world of new and fascinating things it would be simply doing for them what the taking of the photographs has done for us, opened the door into a realm of real life, of a terrible struggle to live, which is as full of fascination as the dragon tales of old Japan. At the same time, it makes us realize what vast and yet untouched fields of material value lie in the efforts man is making to outwit and circumvent and even, perhaps, to exterminate such of the monsters as encroach upon his own environment. HOW THE MONSTER PHOTOGRAPHS WERE TAKEN