Category: Reference -- Information
Catalog ID 20-414-154-3
Book of Monsters
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. Indeed, man’s own real struggle for the supremacy of the world is his struggle to control these tiny monsters.
The plague of the middle ages, which spread like some mysterious supernatural curse over Europe and carried off millions of people, the yellow fever that has haunted the coasts of South America, the malaria which has strewn the tropics of the world with millions of graves, have been caused by the activities of two of these monsters so universally present in our homes as to have become almost domesticated creatures, the flea and the mosquito. During these last two decades these have come under our control, and the flies which leave a colony of germs at every footstep will not much longer be tolerated, indeed, every creature that bites and sucks our blood or that crawls over our food and dishes has been placed under suspicion.
Man struggles against these tiny monsters not only for his life and health but for his food as well. Almost every cultivated plant has its enemy, and some of them have many. The bugs alone which stick their beaks into all sorts of plants to suck their juices would starve man out in one or two brief seasons if they in turn were not held in check by enemies of their own. The chinch bug alone has demonstrated his power to devastate the wheat fields. The bark beetles that girdle square miles of forest trees, the moths that destroy their foliage, the creatures that burrow into the fruit and fruit trees, the gall-forming flies that form galls on the roots of the grape vines able to destroy the revenues of a whole country, the beetle which strips the potato of its leaves, the one which infects with its dirty jaws the melon vines of the South and turns the melon patches brown—these are a few of the vast array of our enemies. It would require a book much larger than this one just to enumerate those well known.
Author David Fairchild and Marian Hubbard (Bell) Fairchild
Available in these Formats Click on the Button to Download
Downloaded: 0
Date Added: June 18, 2012, 5:57 pm
License:
Public Domain books have no restrictions. If no laws establish proprietary rights over a work to restrict its use by the public at large; typically when Copyright has lapsed or has deliberately been waived by the author, it is deemed to be in the Public Domain. Please check the Copyright laws in your country.
---
Not Logged IN
You can Recommend this book to everyone
Submit this page to Stumble
Site Stats
BOOKS
192
Format
Books
PDF
113
EPUB
202
MOBI
174
DOC
3
ODT
8
PDB
67
AUDIO
9
ToTaL
576
cloud
Our Word Cloud 8 letter words or more daughterbeautifulcompaniespresentedhistoricbeautiesmathematicalpublishedantiquitiesinterestinggenerally
