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Nearly three hundred species of _Coleoptera_, or beetles, occupy similar positions. Almost any rotten log or stump when broken open discloses a half dozen or more "horn" or "bess beetles," _Passalus cornutus_ L., great, shining, clumsy, black fellows with a curved horn on the head. They are often utilized as horses by country children, the horn furnishing an inviting projection to which may be fastened, by a thread or cord, chips and pieces of bark to be dragged about by the strong and never lagging beast of burden. When tired of "playing horse" they can make of the insect an instrument of music; for, when held by the body, it emits a creaking, hissing noise, produced by rubbing the abdomen up and down against the inside of the hard, horny wing covers. This beetle passes its entire life in cavities in the rotten wood on which it feeds, and when it wishes a larger or more commodious home it has only to eat the more.

"That is very ungracious," I said. "You are as perverse as I was about Byron when the old banker quoted him with tears. I was going to say, and I will say it, that Tennyson, with all his faults, was a great lord of music; and he put into words the fine, homely domestic emotion of the race--the poetry of labour, order, and peace. It was new and rich and splendid, and because it seems to you old-fashioned, you call it mere respectability; but it was the marching music of the world, because he showed men that faith was enlarged and not overturned by science. These two were great, because they saw far and wide; they knew by instinct just what the ordinary man was thinking, who yet wished his life to be set to music. These little men of yours don't see that. They have their moments of ecstasy, as we all have, in the blossoming orchard full of the songs of birds. And that will always and for ever give us the lyric, if the skill is there. But I want something more than that; I, you, thousands of people, are feeling something that makes the brain thrill and the heart leap. The mischief is that we don't know what it is, and I want a great poet to come and tell us."

It is not surprising under these circumstances to learn that sticklebacks are successful and increasing animals. Their numbers are enormous, wherever they get a fair chance in life, because they multiply rapidly up to the extreme limit of the means of subsistence, and develop as fast as food remains for them. There the inexorable Malthusian law at last steps in: when there is not food enough for all some must starve; that is the long and the short of the great population question. But while provender is forthcoming they increase gayly. Sticklebacks live mainly on the spawn of other fish, though they are so careful of their own, and they are therefore naturally hated by trout-preservers and owners of fisheries in general. Thousands and thousands are caught each year; in some places, indeed, they are so numerous that they are used as manure. It is their numbers, of course, that make them formidable; they are the locusts of the streams, well armed and pugnacious, and provided with most remarkable parental instincts of a protective character, which enables them to fill up all vacancies in their ranks as fast as they occur with astonishing promptitude.

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