make up for the loss of sight by the
addition of touch. The same type of mouth as the grasshopper has will
be found among the beetles. Here the males sometimes have the hard
jaws so enormously enlarged that they are known as pinchers and have
given to their owners the name of pinching bugs. All insects with such
jaws as these use them for breaking up solid food.

A glimpse at the mouth of the butterfly captured on an adjoining
flower will show a most remarkable variation from that seen in the
grasshopper. Practically all of the mouth parts mentioned are present
in this insect, and its early ancestors had their organs practically
like those of the grasshopper. Now they are so modified and united
with each other as to be almost unrecognizable. The pair of soft jaws
has become very much elongated, and they lock together in such a way
as to enclose a hollow space between them through which the creature
can suck its fluid food. Not only have these soft jaws joined
together, but, because they have become so much elongated when not in
use, they must be coiled up like a watch spring and laid between two
hairy lip-like processes which correspond in reality to the two
finger-like feelers of the grasshopper's hind lips.

The butterfly, lighting upon the corolla of the flower, uncurls this
long "tongue," and through its hollow center pumps up into its crop
the nectar which the flower has stored in its base. When the butterfly
comes to get the nectar from the flower, it rubs upon its own hairy
body pollen from the stamens of the flower and carries it to the
pistil of the next flower of the same kind which it visits. Most of
us have at some time sucked the nectar from the back of a torn
honeysuckle blossom and approved the taste of the butterfly in this
matter. If the airy creature be watched as it lights upon a flower, it
will not be difficult to see it uncurl this long tongue and probe the
depths of the flower. If the butterfly be taken in the hand and the
tip of a pin inserted in the center of the coiled tongue, it can be
uncoiled without the slightest harm to the butterfly.

Insects which wish to use for their food the juices of other animals
or of plants do not find them so easy to gather. In the mosquito most
of the mouth parts are developed into slender pointed bristles wrapped
in a hind lip. These bristles serve to puncture the skin of the
creature attacked, while the curled lip serves as a tube through which
the blood ma