Word: ladybug
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...sprawled on his stomach in the grass, wriggled forward, stared intently at a ladybug...
...watched," he later wrote, "I began to wonder how the world must appear to a ladybug: what the sensation would be if my six feet of height dwindled down and down until I was hardly a quarter of an inch long; if I shrank to a thousandth, a ten-thousandth ... a millionth of my present bulk. Like Alice, I began to feel I was 'shutting up like a telescope...
...Then, I imagined the quarter-inch insect expanding to my size, with everything around it enlarging in proportion. It was a curious sensation-like breathing in and out-this contracting and expanding viewpoint. The six-foot ladybug, I perceived, would live in a world where grassblades would be as wide as a highway and would tower hundreds of feet in the air. Crickets twenty-four feet long would crawl through the grassroot jungles. Moths, with wings stretching more than 100 feet from tip to tip, would soar through the air at dusk. Bushes would have the appearance of frowning cliffs...
...jars had been filled with ladybugs and placed in a cold-storage warehouse last Autumn by a force of men under Commissioner Wheeler, who scoured the countryside near El Portal, Calif. Some 8.000,000 bugs had been netted and stored. The reason: A ladybug is capable of eating in a season several thousand of the Aphis (green plant lice) which annually menace vineyards, peach and apricot orchards, and truck gardens in Mercer County...
Puzzled Hindus pondered whether it is now safe to tread upon a ladybug-whose wish at the moment one has no means of ascertaining-would she seem menaced with assault...