The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-10-11
FRIENDS OF HUMANITY
How Bugs and Insects War on the
 Enemies of Vegetables
rom the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

creeps, flies or crawls that can compare with the tiger beetle He Is cannibalistic and Is worth his weight in gold several times over to any man who eats vegeta- bes He is an assassin and a murderer who gobbles his victims when they are small and sucks them dry of their juices when they are too large to swallow in sec- tions.
 Ne will clean out a colony of plant lice in minutes. Plant lice are enemies Of the vegetable eater, and anything that will destroy them is a. friend. Thus 1t is that among the ranks of the bugs themselves there are enemies that help to reduce their numbers.
 This ferocious bug is one of the friends of humanity. Without him and others like him the plant lice and the moths and flies of various kinds would make the fields and lawns look as though they had been sprayed with burning gasoline. With the ambush beetle and the 'soldier bug" and the ''robber fly he rambles ne@e and there in the gardens literally seeking whom he may devour.
 It took America over a century to get an understanding of the fact that ,here are some bugs, snakes and birds that ought not to be killed. Ornthological so- cieties wrestled with state legislatures for a quarter of a century before they were able to get any laws passed that might limit the slaughter of song birds. We have never got far enough along as yet 10 start in protecting the snakes and the tiger bugs. So far they have no friends who would dare to get up and make a plea for the soldier buzz or the tiger beetle"
 Bumblebees are the sworn enemies Of the summer urchin. There is nothing more exciting than whipping out q bumblebees' nest. This same warllke syrI Irl1 h tx.bn ic faiI honey maker, is the one flying thing that the farmer could not afford to have ex- terminated. He keeps the red clover In existence. Without him the red fields would have to go out of existence within a year
 They are part of that vast swarm of flying things that are the little friends of the race. At one end of the list is the owl, who wars unceasingly on the field Ynice and other furry things that 20 nibbling through the corn cribs, wheat stacks and granaries. He can clean out a colony of field mice as fast as the tiger beetle will go through a settlement of plant lice. His habits is not nice and his voice is net very musical, but as killer of furry pests he has no equal.
 Sitting on stump of dead tree in the moonlight or on top of g. fence stake about dusk, those yellow eyes of his miss noth- ing that moves for 90 feet on either side of him. When a tiny eye shines among the grass a dark spot moves across a corn row these is no noise. Just a silent drop of big yellow eyes and long talents on that dark spot that squeaks once or maybe twice.
 Boys dig earth worms to use as fish bait This sluggish angle worm is natures own blow At times the soil is fairly alive with those elongated wrigglers all busy blowing through the earth up and down for F or 15 inches. They stir up the soil as nothing else can do. They bring the deeper earth to the surface and prevent the top layer from being exhausted of it's fertile parts. Some seientis with a genius Tor flguring once spent year or so com putting the amount of soil that was brought to the surface of 40 acre field by these busy angle worms.
 It amounted to many cubic wards and was so evenly distributed that the men who till the fields would never have mo- ticed 1t at all. As disk harrow you can not beat the angle worm. Few farmers or gardeners realize that the ordinary fish worm is one of their greatest helpers.
 Some states still pay bounty for the heads of the crow. All the arguments that can be brought forward proving that they are destroyers of field pests does but little good when there are few farm CTS in a state legislature. Have they uot Seeh tne plack tniet pull up a row of green corn shoots on a wet morning aloug in May? This single instance of serious robbery outweighs all the good that he may do for the rest of the year. As a matter of cold fact, he helps the farmer and the gardener fully as much as they are able to help themselves.
 A toad sits on the garden wall in sun ny spot. He is apparently asleep A fly lights within six inches of his nose ana heOjnS q i'm al ;,, denly that fly is there no longer. The toad settles a little more comfortably on the walk. Every fly that lights in that locality disappears and yet the toad has not moved out of his tracks. He doesn't have 10 so long as nature furnishes him with an elastic tongue that will flick fly off the walk inches away from the toad himself.