The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-10-18

"Speaking of political conventions
reminds me of bugs" said the ancient
mariner, romancer of seven seas, and be
reached for his papers and rolled a
cigarette "And about bugs-wen, l
know something of strange bugs. I've
been bit by 'em, crawled over by 'em,
driven crazy by 'em all the way from
Petropavlovsky to Nova Zembla.
"'These fellows write books about
wild animals they have known. Why
say, young man, if 1 should write book
about wild bugs I've known I'd have
all the publishers offering me a dollar a
word. That's something's of the ordi-
nary, you know-that wild bugs sub
iect. / m something of bird faneier
myself, and what I've done to help the
Smithsonian out in the line of preserv-
ed bugs had best be kept private, for
m a modest man.
"Now, for instance, right here on
East Twenty-third street, New York,
after we batted about the whole world
and been bitten by more kinds of bugs
than you could hunt up in Ornithology
books in month comes a beetle and
bites me thirty-six times on one leg.
But wait"
The ancient mariner reached in his
desk and brought out a paper upon
which was drawn in ink chart of his
leg, each of the thirty-six bites being
noted by a dot. He pointed to the
array of dots with his cigarette holder
and continued:
"This here beetle / take to be one of
the very rare species of geometrical
beetles found in the Celebes, down off
the coast of Java. i never saw one
outside the islands there before. But
along comes this beetle and takes those
thirty-six bites out of me one night a
week ago, and the next morning found
him, put him in bottle of alcohol and
shipped him down to the Smithsonian
as very rare type.
''The geometrical beetle is so named
because he always bites in strictly
geometrical designs. You notice by
this chart here that these bites are in
two exactly parallel lines, each line con-
tanning the same number of spots.
''Now draw imaginary lines between |
the top bite on the left hand line and !
the bottom bite on the right hand line !
and you get a regular parallelogram, !
which can be divided by pi if you are |
a mariner like myself and know how TO |
take the sun. Some of these beetles |
down in the Celebes i we known to bite !
a perfect Pythagorean problem on a !
man s back-the sum of the squares of
the opposite sides of right triangle /
equal the square of-well, you know !
how it goes. Yes, sir, you could stand /
right up against that mamie was a
Swede-and work out that problem,
using the lines that beetle had bit.
EBut / must say the geometrical
beetle can't touch the East Indian
cockroach. I think that eockroaeh is
the king of bugs, just like the lion is
the king of beasts, which he ism t, for
a tiger gives you bigger run for your !!
money. Why, when l was shooting
tigers down in the Malay States-but
to get back to that coekroach.
''He is as long as your finger and as
broad as the blade of a kitchen knife /
and he has legs on him that Gan take
him over the side of your ships cabin
so quick all you can see is a blur. He
also smells, but that we won't talk
about
''Well, sir, this cockroach you get
south of Singapore and east of Alden, b
all the way down to Australia. What
makes him so bOthersome is his feeding ]
habits. He III come up to you at night
and gnaw all your toenails off if you I
happen to be heavy sleeper like my
self; yes sir, he ii gnaw 'em down to
The quick. Not fngernails, just toe
nails he prefers. /
''Not only that, but he II eat all the {
yaxed thread out of your shoes. You
wake up in the morning and start to put