INSECT BEHAVIOUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 766, 26 March 1954, Page 12

INSECT BEHAVIOUR

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF INSECTS, by Alonso Gaul; Victor Gollanez, English price 21/-. AUL loves insects. It is obvious, even when he speaks of their depredations, that he is more than a little proud of them. How they order their lives is obviously of intense interest to him, and somehow that interest is communicated to the reader. As one would expect, there are chapters on the relations of insects with man. Yet Gaul is at his best when inviting our interest in insect behaviour for its own sake. On the dust cover the enterprising publishers have collected somé of the oddities from the text. Grasshoppers’ ears afe on their front knees, for example; or a single square yard of earth may support more than 10,000 insects. They are sufficiently bizarre to attract the wandering attention, though they do the book an injustice. It is no collection of sensational oddities but a very readable attempt to examine the insect’s world. One is grateful, too, ‘that Gaul will have none of the mawkish "humanising" of his subject that first cloys and then irritates in much recent biology. He trenchantly disposes of insect intelligence and of utopian insect society. The enormous range of his subject matter probably accounts for an abrupt leaping from topic to topic. The chapter atrangement, too, is certainly not the best possible if an orderly presentation is desired. Nor is an index of two pages adequate when there are more species of insects than of all the rest of living things put together. The four pages of references, however, may serve as a useful guide to further reading. The illustrations, all by the author, are magnificent.

J. D.

McD.