In early spring, if one examines the leaf-buds of rose trees, which now begin to swell, one may often see tiny little black specks, like grains of gunpowder, scattered over their surface, especially within any fold or crevice which it presents. These are the eggs of the Aphides, insects which, if not cicadas, are not so very far removed from them, and which, looked at from various points of view, are extremely interesting little creatures. One of these points of view, which we may conveniently start from, is their extraordinary rate of increase, which exceeds even that of the Chinese. “A single insect,” says Mr. Buckton, “hatched from one of these shining black ova may be the mother of many billions of young, even during her lifetime. Réaumur calculated that one Aphis may be the mother of the enormous number of 5,904,900,000 individuals during the month or six weeks of her existence. But neither Tongard nor Morren is satisfied with this estimate, both declaring that quintillions are within the capabilities of a single mother’s efforts. Professor Huxley (who, by the way, was not interested in the alleged phenomena of spiritualism, _even if true_) makes a curious calculation which, at any rate, affords some approximate idea of what a quintillion of Aphides might mean. Assuming that an Aphis weighs as little as one-thousandth of a grain (which is less than I should ever have thought), and that it requires a man to be very stout to weigh more than two million grains, he shows that the tenth brood of Aphides alone, without adding the product of all the generations which precede the tenth, if all the members survive the perils to which they are exposed, contains more ponderable substance than 500,000,000 of stout men: that is, more than the whole population of China.”[37] This, it appears, is an under-estimate, which is rather annoying, for one would like to call it a gross exaggeration. But facts are facts—in whatever degree they may interest one—and it is impossible not to feel respect for an insect like this, especially in these days, when the diminished returns of the census are beginning to cause alarm as to the future destinies even of our own once proudly fecund race. It is a wonderful record for a single individual—to have weighed down China—and when Mr. Buckton remarks that facts like these regarding the prolific nature of Aphides “afford sufficient explanation of the occurrence of the extraordinary swarms so often noticed by authors,”[37] nobody is likely to disagree with him. With billions a certainty, and quintillions in the air, swarms seem amply accounted for.