Sharp County record., 1881-06-02
In an Insects Place.


What horrible place must this world
appear when regarded according 10 our
ideas from an insects point OF view!
The air infested with huge flying hungry
dragons, whose gaping and swapping
mouths are ever intent upon swallow
inc the innocent creatures for whom,
according to the insects, if he were like
us, a properly constructed world ought
to be exclusively adapted. The solid
earth continually shaken by the aP-
preaching tread of hideous giants
moving mountains that crush out
precious lives at every fOOtstep, an oc'
casional draught of the blood OF these
monsters, stolen at life-risk, afording
but poor compensation for such fatal
persecution.
Let us hope that the little victims are
less like ourselves than the dOings OF
ants and bees might lead us to suprpsei
that their mental anxieties are not pro-
portionate to the optical vigilance indi-
Gated by the four thousand eye-lenses
of the common house fly, the seventeen
thousand of the cabbage butterfly and
the wide awake dragOn-hy, or the tWen-
ty-fve thousand possessed by certain
species of still more yigilant beetles.
The insect must see a whole world OF
wonders of which we know little or
nothing. True, we have microscopes,
with which we can see one thing at a
time if carefully laid upon the stagei
but what is the finest instrument that
Ross can produce compared to that with
TWENTY-FIVE thousand object glasses, all
of them probably achrOmatic, and each
one living instrument with its own
nerve branch supplying a separate sen,
sation? To creatures thus endowed
with microscopic vision, a cloud OF
sandy dust must appear like an avail
anche of massive rock fragments, and
every thing else proportionauy mon
strOus.
Insects are probably acquainted with
a whole world of physical facts OF which
we are utterly ignorant. Our auditory
apparatus supplies us with knowledge
of sounds. What are these sounds?
They are vibrations Of matter which are
capable of producing corresponding or
sympathetic vibrations OF the drums of
our ears or the bones Of our skull.
When we carefully examine the subject,
and count the number OF vibrations that
produce our world of sounds of varying
pitch, we find that the human ear can
only respond to a limited range of such
vibrations. If they exceed three thou
sand per second, the sound becomes too
shrill for average people to hear 1t,
though some exceptional ears can take
up pulsations of waves that succeed each
other more rapidly than this.
Reasoning from the analogy of
stretched strings and membranes and
of air vibrating in tubes, etc, we are
justified in concluding that the smaller
the drum or tube the higher will be the
note it produces when agitated, and
the smaller and the more rapid the aerial
wave to which it will respond. The
drums of insect ears, and the tubes, ETC.,
connected with them, are so minute
that their world of sounds probably be-
gins where ours ceases; that what ap-
pears to us as a continuous sound IS to
them series of separated blows just as
vibrations of ten or twelve per second
appear separated to us. We begin to
when they amount to about thirty per
hear such vibrations as continuous sounds
second. The insects continuous sound
probably begins beyond three thousand.
The blue, bottle may thus enjoy whole
world of exquisite music of which we
know nothing. g.-BeIgraUia.