When all is said, the cogged drum need not be looked down upon. It enlivens the lawns, murmurs the joys and tribulations of existence, sends the lover’s call echoing all around, brightens the weary waiting of the lonely ones, tells of the perfect blossoming of insect life. Its stroke of the bow is almost a voice. And this magnificent gift, so full of promise, is granted only to the inferior races, coarse natures, near akin to the crude beginnings of the carboniferous period. If, as we are told, the superior insect descends from ancestors who have been gradually transformed, why did it not preserve that fine inheritance of a voice which has sounded from the earliest ages? Can it be that the theory of progressive acquirements is only a specious lure? Are we to abandon the savage theory of the crushing of the weak by the strong, of the less well-endowed by their more highly-gifted rivals? Is it permissible to doubt, when the evolutionists talk to us of the survival of the fittest? Yes, indeed it is! We are told as much by a certain Libellula of the carboniferous age (Meganeura Monyi, Brong.), measuring over two feet across the wings. The giant Dragon-fly, who terrified the small winged folk with her sawlike mandibles, has disappeared, whereas the puny Agrion, with her bronze or azure abdomen, still hovers over the reeds of our rivers. So have her contemporaries disappeared, the monstrous sauroid fishes, mailed in enamel and armed to the teeth. Their scarce successors are mere abortions. The splendid series of Cephalopods with partitioned shells, including certain Ammonites of the diameter of a cartwheel, has no other representative in our present seas than that modest fireman’s helmet, the Nautilus. The Megalosaurus, a saurian twenty-five yards long, was a more alarming figure in our country-sides than the Grey Lizard of the walls. One of man’s contemporaries, that monumental beast the Mammoth, is known only by his remains; and his near kinsman the Elephant, a mere Sheep beside him, goes on prospering. What a shock to the law of the survival of the strongest! The mighty have gone under; and the weak fill their place. CHAPTER XIV THE GREEN GRASSHOPPER We are in the middle of July. The astronomical dog-days are just beginning; but in reality the torrid season has anticipated the calendar and for some weeks past the heat has been overpowering.