BY DAVID AND MARIAN FAIRCHILD PORTRAITS AND BIOGRAPHIES OF A FEW OF THE INHABITANTS OF WOODLAND AND MEADOW WASHINGTON NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY 1914 Copyrighted by National Geographic Society 1914 CONTENTS   BOOK OF MONSTERS The pictures in this book are portraits of creatures which are as much the real inhabitants of the world as we are, and have all the rights of ownership that we have, but, because their own struggle for existence so often crosses ours, many of them are our enemies. Indee

  THE SPIDER WORLD In enlarging the images of these small spiders to many times their size, one is at once struck by their similarity to crabs and lobsters. Their jointed legs encased in shells, which from time to time they shed, remind one strongly of the crabs, and they do in fact belong to the some great family, the family of arthropods, and they are not insects. The spider world is the world of eight-legged creatures just as the insect world is the world of the six-legged ones, and educated

  STRAIGHT-WINGED INSECTS ( Orthoptera ) When children play with pebbles on the beach, they often put the red ones in one group, the white ones in another. It is much the same with men, they try to put the things that are alike together, and in the bewildering multitude of shapes and forms and habits with which the insect specialists have had to deal, they catch at any similarity, and put together in one group a lot of creatures which are only alike in a few particulars. In the straight-winged o

  THE WORLD OF MYRIAPODS AND A LAND CRUSTACEAN Every one who has turned over a rotten log has seen these thousand-legged worms, and yet I wonder if many of us have known that these weird wandering things resemble, and are the direct living descendants of some of the first animals which crept up out of the sea to live upon the land. Long ages before the warm-blooded, lung-breathing beasts came into existence, they worked their way up out of their water life among the corals, sponges, worms, shell