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Science Gleanings in Many Fields; Studies in Natural History
Science Gleanings in Many Fields Studies in Natural History Author:John Gibson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1884 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: V. ANIMAL FOES. In the constant struggle for possession of our common mother earth, man is not uniformly victorious over the lower animals. The strength of the tiger, it is true, is no match for human skill and cunning; nor can even the serpent, that deadliest if not subtlest beast of the field, hold its own against man in any quarter of the globe. The only creatures that have the slightest chance in this struggle are those which individually are the weakest and most insignificant. It is not the lion and tiger among mammals, but the mouse and the rabbit, which thus compete most successfully with the human race -- a fact which lately received forcible illustration in the plague of mice which visited Bohemia and destroyed the crops, while the inhabitants could do little more than look on and see their hopes of a harvest blasted. Much more formidable foes than either of those feeble rodents are, however, to be found among a class of still more insignificant creatures -- namely, insectswhich, over certain areas of the earth's surface, take man's place as " lords of creation." There are districts in South America from which man has been driven by the ant, and there are many parts of Africa where the tsetse fly practically excludes him, by allowing neither his oxen, horses, nor dogs to live. Although such extreme cases are rare, and occur only in tropical climates, yet man in all parts of the world is ever and anon reminded of the enormous collective power of insects by the injuries they periodically inflict on the produce of his fields. The most painful experience of this kind that has probably occurre...« less