AS OTHERS SEE US.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 471, 5 June 1912, Page 7

AS OTHERS SEE US.

MAN AS A MONSTROSITY. The bird's eye view is a familiar thing to most people—but what a l :out an insect's eye view ? Recent investigations by scientists into the formation and the mechanism of the eyes of beetles, butterflies, moths, gnats, and other little insects, and microscopic examination of the moss and fungus growths among which many of them live show that the insect's view of nature would be to man most astonishing. They destroy many current suppositions, and substitute others more remarkable.

For instance, it has been found that many insects and almost all beetles have the use of two different sets of eyes in the same head. One set is known as the ocelli or simple cj es. Usually there are. three of these, and they are used to examine objects close at hand. The others are the compound eyes made up of an enormous mass of tiny lenses —in the dragon fly the number has been estimated as 12,544 —and which they use to catch objects in motion or at a distance. Both classes of eyes possess great magnifying power, or rather are able to catch in minute details things too small to be visible to the human eye. When main wants to see at a distance he has to buy a telescope, or when he wants to see things closely he has to buy a microscope or a magnifying glass ; if his sight is defective he may buy a pair of spectacles for close application and another pair for distances. Tn the compound and simple eyes Nature has provided the insects with all these for nothing. The astonishing discovery has been made that when an insect wants to see out of his simple eyes lie switches the "seeing current" off the compound, and when he wants to see out of the compound he switches off the simple eyes.

The average man stands 2,200 times the height of an ant. If the world were turned topsy-turvy, and we retained our height while the ant became as large comparatively to us as we are now to the ant, that insect would be a monster indeed, with legs a mile high, and a body reaching a mile and a half above that. Yet we do not look so high as that to an ant or any other insect. As a man steps towards a beetle, the insect would see him with his compound eyes, because the approaching object would be in motion. What he would see would be an enormous outline of a foot. It would be lillecl with deep pits which would be the pores in the leather ; and deep creasses, the lines of the skin. Above this gigantic foot would extend an object somewhat pyramidal and foreshortened. That would be the body of the man. Four men walking abreast towards a beetle would present the terrifying sight of four immense feet and tapering bodies above extended in a curious angle.

A sparrow suddenly flying into the ken of a butterfly with its moutb open to devour it would be still more curious. The first thing the insect would see would be the tongue, which would seem enormous, with the end enlarged like the clapper of a bell. Behind would be a cavern of gaping

jaws and behind it immense eyes

The body would taper suddenly, and the wings would seem like little flapping wedges. The bird would to us like some monster from the Arabian Nights, but would not seem extraordinary to the insect, because that is the way it has always seen the birds.

When a ladybird rests on your hand, it does not see the fine white skin that the poet speaks of sc touchingly, but even if your hands are the whitest and the finest. It sees, instead, a ridged surface ii: which are deep pits, and from which rise stalks somewhat like thin sapplings of a bamboo forest. Iho pits arc the pores in the skin, and th2 ■sapplings are the tiny hairs rising from the follicles. A poet insect :ould never rave over any lady's delicate hands.

The compound eyes are horny and unprotected by any eyelid, of large size, and placed on the sides of th: head. They consist of hundreds of minute hexagonal lenses, or facets, giving the eye a reticulated appearance. Each of these lenses operates as a distinct organ of vision, although the hundreds of images they transmit to the brain do not, ii see.ms, appear separately to the insect.

There seems to be no useful pur pose to be served in an insect seeing

five thousand separate images of one person. What is more likely, says Professor C. V. Riley, a famous en tomologist, is that ail these lenses act in much the same way as u moving picture film, recording one continuous image in all directions, and resolving every motion down tc a fineness inconceivable to the human eye. As it has been proved that the compound eye is most useful tc the insect in apprehending swiftly moving objects, such as flying birds this is probably so. Bach of the human eyes records its separate image, which is resolved into one image by the brain. Under alcoholic stimulation, the eyes sometimes work independently, which is what is commonly known as seeing double. This h said to be a very uncomfortable anc puzzling sensation. An intoxicated butterfly with 17,355 images of one thing before it 'would be foolish under the same circumstances, if it did not sign the pledge.

As to the total of lenses in thf compound eyes, Dr. Otto Birnlein, o St. Petersburg, has recently est! mated .that. in.. .{toe egeg of the seeing

sats -'twere are fifty lenses ; in Cm common house-fly 4,000 Isnses ; n the silkworm moth 6,236 lenses ; it the dragon fly 12,514, and in the butterfly 17,355 lenses. According t< a calculation by Geoffrey, the butter fly has not less than 34,(>50 of thesi minute hexagonal cells in each com pound eye. —"Popular Science Sift ings."