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BLACK-BEETLES

BY J. ARTHUR THOMSON

From The New Statesman, May 21 (LIBERAL LABOR WEEKLY)

ONE cannot expect enthusiasm on the subject of 'Black-beetles,' though they are not so black as they are painted, and though they are certainly not beetles. Cockroaches they should be called, if one wishes to be correct: Orthoptera, not Coleoptera. The common or Oriental cockroach, Blatta orientalis, is really dark brown, and it is worth. noticing that Linnæus, who named it, said 'ferrugineofusca,' meaning, we suppose, rusty-brown. It is an alien to Britain, believed to have been introduced through commerce during the sixteenth century whence, we do not know, though the discovery of some specimens living under stones and dead leaves in the Crimean peninsula points to Southern Russia as its original home. It is now found over the whole earth, and the only thing we are quite sure about is that it must have come to us from some warmer country. For it survives in Britain only as a sheltered member of our house fauna.

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The common cockroach has a cousin, the German cockroach, Blattella germanica, dark-ochre or tawny, another naturalized alien, which is wild in the more central and northern parts of Europe and Asia. The politically minded may be interested to learn that this voracious, destructive, comfort-loving creature is called 'the Prussian' in Russia and 'the Russian' in Prussia - surely in its way a little parable.

Having these two kinds of blackbeetles, we have more than enough; but there are unfortunately others - the

large American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, common in shipping ports, and the Australian cockroach, Periplaneta australasia, a very destructive immigrant which probably came from Southeast Asia or Tropical Africa. The international compliments implied in the specific names, such as australasia, are not always justified. The scientific interest is this, that certain cockroaches, living a penurious life in the open in various countries, get linked to a traderoute, and spread over the earth as tenants of warm and sheltered places. We have here a notable instance of the influence of the hand of man upon the animal life of the earth. But there is something rather depressing in the fact that while the total number of different kinds of animals in Britain has not decreased since the repopulation after the Ice Ages, we have received rabbit and rat and lost reindeer and beaver, we have received cockroaches and the bed-bug, and lost the wolf and the stately Irish 'elk.' We have lost, not in quantity, but in quality of life.

Mr. Lucas notes that for any insect to have two colloquial names indicates that it is common and familiar, and as we spoke of black-beetles as a misnomer we wish to say a word about cockroach. It is said to be a corruption of the Spanish 'cucaracha,' probably meaning some sort of bug ('cuco'); and if this is so, we must agree with Mr. Shelford, another authority on these insects, that the American elision of the significant first syllable to give them the

name ‘roach,' already appropriated for a fish, is highly reprehensible. So that's that.

What is the secret of the success of the common and the German cockroach, not to speak of the others, in countries, like Britain, to which they are certainly not native? Our three indigenous cockroaches (Ectobius) that live out-of-doors are much less successful and are practically negligible. The success of the naturalized aliens depends on a variety of qualities. They are nocturnal in their operations; they run very quickly; they are able because of their much flattened bodies to get into inaccessible crevices; and in becoming domestic, they have got away from their natural enemies. Another quality of great survival-value is their wide range of appetite. As Mr. Frederick Laing says in his admirable British Museum pamphlet, The Cockroach (1921): 'Nothing which is at all edible comes amiss to them in the way of food. The paper or the whitewash on the wall, books, boots, hair, are all eaten as readily as the daintiest dish.' They are very fond of good beer. In a well-known book on the cockroach by Professors Miall and Denny it is observed: 'Cucumber, too, they will eat, though it disagrees with them horribly.' They have been known to try ink and blacking; they devour their own cast-off clothes (or moults), their own empty egg-capsules, and their own dead!

As long as they are not full-grown, they have this further advantage, that they can regrow their long tactile feelers and their lanky legs if these get broken provided always that a little stump is left to serve as a startingpoint for the regeneration.

As to family matters, the females of the common cockroach are about three times as numerous as the males, and have rudimentary wings. The pairing occurs in the summer months, and

about sixteen eggs are laid at a time inside a dark-brown egg-capsule, which splits when the young ones are ready to come out. Mr. Laing notices that in most cases only ten or eleven of the sixteen eggs are hatched. The young cockroaches should not be called larvæ, for they are practically miniatures of their parents, though at first very delicate and with hardly any color. They grow slowly, and take about five years to become mature, moulting usually once a year. Perhaps things move more quickly when the conditions are less artificial than those which allow of scientific observation. Not that we wish them to move any faster, for Mr. Laing notes that three females kept in captivity from April to September laid twenty-five capsules. 'If we reckon that each laid, on an average, eight capsules, and that out of each capsule ten larvæ emerged, the progeny from a single female would total eighty. The numbers of cockroaches in our kitchens, therefore, can easily be explained.'

The German cockroach is only about half the size of the one we call Common; it is dark yellow or light brown in color; the females have wings as well as the males, and greatly outnumber them. The egg-capsule holds on an average about forty eggs, and it is carried about by the mother for two to four weeks until the young are ready to hatch out. As in the Common species, the capsule breaks and the young ones put their heads out; but there is this difference, that the mother is interested and helps them to escape. The newly hatched cockroaches are white and cylindrical, able to run about from the first; they soon flatten and become dark in color. Growth is rapid, and after about five months and as many moults (with a return to the white color at each disrobing), maturity is reached.

Perhaps there is not much of the romantic about black-beetles, but their

repugnant smell and taste, due partly to the salivary juice and partly to waxglands on the body, forbid impartiality. We say 'taste,' because it is notorious that they contaminate food carelessly left exposed. But no unprejudiced eye can call them ugly; and a green species we got the other day from Bristol was a truly beautiful insect. There is interest also in the glimpse of maternal care that we get in the German cockroach, pointing on to another kind, that Mr. Shelford tells us of, which carries about its lately hatched young ones.

The voracity of cockroaches, their contamination of food, and their repulsive smell, mean big black marks against them, and Mr. Laing notes in his excellent sixpennyworth that 'their presence in greater or lesser numbers may produce such a mental effect upon the inhabitants of a house as to react detrimentally upon the general health and well-being.' He tells us how they may be kept in check by means of traps and an excellent mixture of sodium fluoride and pyrethrum powder. But there is a broader way of looking at the matter, namely that cockroaches are disposing of 'crumbs' (in the wide sense) which are quite gratuitous, and that they are often sheltering in crevices which need not be there. They are com

parable in a way to invertebrate rats. Though they have not been convicted as yet of being the vehicles of any disease that affects man, Mr. Laing tells us that the Common cockroach serves as secondary host to a bacillus which produces cancer in rats.

Although there is very little to be put on the plus side of our account with cockroaches, unless it be that they prey upon bed-bugs, we have reason for congratulating ourselves in one respect, that the Golden Age of cockroaches is over and gone. For they are insects of long pedigree, and they were at their climax at the time of the Coal-Measures. In his fine Ray Society monograph on British Orthoptera (1920), Mr. W. J. Lucas writes: 'Since Palæozoic times cockroaches appear to have decreased in numbers greatly, if not so much in size, and they must now be looked upon as but a dwindling remnant of a dying race. Let the careful housewife find in this fact what consolation she can: at any rate she may rejoice that the Carboniferous period is past, and that she is not required to combat the host of cockroaches which luxuriated in the warm, moist climate of that far-distant age.' We are glad of this consolation, but we do not fancy ourselves explaining it downstairs.

THE FAMILISTÈRE OF GUISE

BY AUGUST STRINDBERG

[These hitherto unknown journals of the greatest Swedish poet of the nineteenth century' have just been given to the public by his executor. They are particularly interesting as a new account of a famous communist experiment in Northern France.]

From Vossische Zeitung May 15
(BERLIN CONSERVATIVE-LIBERAL Daily)

I HAD been so often cautioned, on the one hand, not to put faith in Utopias and visionary experiments, and exhorted, on the other, to build up instead of always tearing down, that at last I felt it a duty to discover some actual Utopia and to study and describe the way it worked. So I wrote my Swiss Novels, or Real Utopias. By the word real I meant to indicate that the plans there discussed had already been tested, and to impress on the reader that he had firm ground under his feet.

What happened? Well, one very intelligent friend, who himself had written much about the society of the future, hastened to thank me for the beautiful visions of a coming age, which I had embodied in my fiction.

So I had the old experience of Hans the Clown, who tried to tell the audience in the theatre that the building was on fire, only to receive thunders of applause for his clever joke. Really, it is a fine position in which they place us poets! We are applauded and lauded, but never believed. We entertain and delight, but never instruct. Why is n't poetry taken seriously? Is it our fatal destiny to be merely a higher kind of clown? And does our latest school of creative literature, with its ambiguous documents humains improve our status? Hardly.

So nothing was left for me to do last autumn but to make a personal visit to the social experiment at Guise, in the Aisne Department, in order that I might describe it with the authority of an eye-witness. Now I propose to give a plain, unadorned, matter-of-fact account of the Communist Palace, the Familistère, which has prospered there for nearly thirty years, known to few and overlooked by many.

The reader who is familiar with my earlier and colored account in my Swiss novel, Die Studentin, oder Neubau, which was based on printed reports, can now compare the unadorned reality with its poetic description, and perhaps, like myself, he will prefer the report to the story. In any case, I hope that this matter-of-fact letter will not have the misfortune, which many might regard an honor, to be taken for fiction.

When the traveler in the Brussels train has passed Compiègne, has left the Isle of France, and has reached Picardy, he observes that he has come to a more northern clime. The people are blond, stocky, and rosycheeked. The wine at the station buffets gets worse and the beer more drinkable. The cottages no longer have white roofs, and they are less cheery than those south of Paris. Their bare

reddish-brown tiles lend the villages a dull, gloomy North German aspect. Old-fashioned windmills add to the northern character of the landscape, and suggest the vicinity of Holland.

This is the land of the white beet. As far as the eye can reach, stretch fields where nature is drawing from the fertile soil the material for sugar and spirits. Their broad expanses furnish subjects for exhibition paintings, and may lighten the labors of plantation negroes. Who knows?

On a rainy Saturday evening, when the chimes of the Gothic Town Hall tower were ringing a strophe of the Sicilian Vespers, my traveling companion and I alighted in the great market of Saint-Quentin. Close by the railway station is a monument to commemorate the heroic defense of Saint-Quentin, in 1870, against the Prussians. Are the French not a nation of self-confident optimists, who erect monuments to their defeat, and date their progress from their disasters? Or is it perhaps merely the folly of a patriotism which never admits defeat?

The monument, by Barrias, represents an infantryman mortally wounded, his hand relaxing on his rifle, sinking back into the arms of a woman. She is glorious, robust, maternal, feminine, twice as large as the little dying soldier whom her outstretched arms support. Behind her stands a spinning-wheel. Not understanding what this symbol meant, I asked my companion.

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He replied: The French idea of courtesy. As usual, they show little real reverence for women. She stayed home at the spinning-wheel, while the men went to the front and were shot. After all that they set up a monument to her! She courageously supports the man who sinks dying at her feet. If that is modern art, it is certainly oldfashioned.'

But I object: 'Probably she repre

sents a mother, to whose comforting bosom the wounded man fled, as he did when he was hurt in childhood. That is old-fashioned, perhaps, but it is also eternally new.'

While our cab toils up the hill, my thoughts fly back to the monument at Courbevoie, where this same Barrias designed a statue to commemorate the heroic defense of Paris; in other words, its capture by the Prussians. The French, of course, insist that Paris never was taken by the Prussians, but surrendered voluntarily. Accordingly it is more honorable to surrender than to fall! Chacun son plat.

At Courbevoie likewise a very small man sinks wounded, his rifle shattered, at the feet of a woman. But this time it is a different woman slender, broad chested, wearing a soldier's mantle and bandelier. If I remember rightly, she has a bayonet in her hand; and she stares defiantly at the victorious enemy. She has the hard masculine features and pitiless air of an Amazon. There is nothing maternal about her.

The sculptor seems to have represented two contrasting ideals of womanhood in these statues; the contrast which we find everywhere in modern woman. He did not take sides. Possibly he hesitated which to select, and so tried both. I do take sides, unhesitatingly, for the mother-ideal of SaintQuentin.

On Sunday morning we begin the last stage of our journey, which is to bring us to Guise in a few hours. Possibly it was just here, where we now see boundless fields of sugar-beets, that the queens of Austria and Neustria, Brynhild and Fredegunda, fought their bloody battles, and the former queen was finally torn to pieces by wild horses, after exterminating like an Amazon the royal house of the Merovingians. That was not a royal death, but certainly not the death of a slave.

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