Part 4

My! my! what eyes!

Don't crowd, Amy; let little Nell see too.

What is that you say, Richard? "It catches mosquitoes and gnats and flies and other insects while flying."

Yes, and that is why it has such big eyes. We should need big eyes ourselves if we were to spend our time chasing mosquitoes.

Two eyes you have, little dragon fly, like the rest of us, but your eyes are not like ours.

No, indeed!

Each of your big eyes is made up of a great many small eyes packed close together.

Do you know, children, that some of the largest of the dragon flies have as many as twenty thousand facets, or small eyes, in each large eye?

Think of it! Forty thousand eyes in one little dragon fly head. It ought to see well.

These facets are six-sided, excepting those along the edge, which are rounded on the outside. You cannot see their real shape without a microscope, they are so small. But here is a picture of some facets as they look under the microscope.

Eyes like these, made up of many facets, we call compound eyes.

All grown-up insects have compound eyes, though not many have as large ones as the dragon fly.

Only insects that chase other insects or that need to see in the dark have very large eyes.

See what a big mouth the dragon fly has. Its jaws do not show unless it opens its lower lip, which fits over its mouth like a mask.

I should not care to have it bite my finger.

It could not hurt very much, and its bite is not poisonous, still I shall handle it carefully.

Some call the dragon fly a darning needle, and say it sews up people's ears when they lie on the grass. This is not true. It does not sew up anything. It has nothing to sew with.

Why should it want to sew up people's ears, anyway?

It does nothing unpleasant but bite fingers, and it never goes out of its way to do that.

If we let it alone, it always lets us alone.

It is our good friend because it catches mosquitoes. For this reason it is sometimes called mosquito hawk.

We should never kill a dragon fly.

Sometimes it is called a spindle, I suppose because it is long and slender like a spindle.

Down South the colored people believe the dragon fly brings dead snakes to life, and they call it snake doctor.

In some places it is called snake feeder.

But it has nothing to do with snakes, dead or alive.

The French have given it a pretty name, demoiselle, or damsel fly, and that is quite deserved, for the dragon fly is a graceful little creature, as pretty as pretty can be.

See, sticking out of the front of its head are two little feelers, or antennae, as we must call them.