Word: insects
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...owes its new firefly colony mainly to a pretty, 19-year-old Grinnell College girl who lives far away in Washington, D. C. When Mary Ellen Appleby, daughter of Assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture Paul H. Appleby, was a little girl, she was terrified of every kind of insect ("I'd run a mile from a daddy long-legs") except fireflies, which she loved. She began to read up on fireflies, learned a lot of things about them-for example, that what makes them flash is a luminous substance called luciferin secreted in their abdomens, that most entomologists...
...small, smug thoughts and words of Edgar Hopkins (poultry breeder and amateur astronomer), Ex-Insurance Clerk Robert Cedric Sherriff (Journey's End, St. Helena) gives an insect's-eye view of what happened when the moon got out of whack in 1945, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, all but wiped out Europe by tornado, earthquake and flood. The moon's havoc was less than the human havoc which followed. England, now changed from an island to a landlocked meadow on the fringe of Europe, demanded a "British Corridor" to the sea at Gibraltar, but the Corridor blocked...
...Many plants are cross-fertilized, but by wind-borne or insect-borne pollen-the equivalent of sperm in men and animals...
...Daniel Defoe were alive today he would probably be writing for the Hearst papers. His Robinson Crusoe was the greatest and most enjoyable journalistic hoax in history. His accounts of London fires, plagues, streetwalkers, ghosts and insect pests would be welcome copy for any Sunday supplement. When Reporter Defoe went to Scotland in 1706 to spy out political sentiment for his secret master, Secretary of State Robert Harley, he improved his time by picking up believe-it-or-not tales of a bridge over a dry river (between Glasgow and Sterling), of fishermen who killed porpoises with a sock...
...melancholy humor of many a modern Jaques. E. B. W. dips the broken reed with which he writes into various liquids-diluted acid, crocodile tears, the milk of human kindness; and the thread of his writing is like the trail of a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes exasperating, always bewildered insect...