THE INHERITORS
Meyer, Ernest L.
The Inheritors By ERNEST L. MEYER IN THE WOODS Sunday a fallen leaf took life, and walked away. It was a maple leaf, bleached to a pale gray-green, and it lay on a stump where it had dropped. Why...
...Camouflage is a highly developed science in the art of war...
...In small size, in enormous fecundity and rapidity of multiplication, in power of speedy adaption to conditions, in rapidity of flight and locomotion, the insects are vastly superior...
...For one thing, these prophets, by standing amazed before a phenomenon like protective mimicry in the insect world, seem to imply that the human is incapable of such wizardy...
...Even in days of peace, people—notably the species known as politicians—can be many different things at many different places...
...Nothing new, and yet forever fascinating-—that curious insect, the "walking stick...
...Suicidal Use of Genius In other words, humanity has initiated and excelled the tricks once peculiar to the lower forms, and if these tricks were employed always for humane ends we would have nothing to fear from our insect rivals in the race for dominance...
...More people are killed by people each year in traffic accidents than are killed by the microscopic bugs of tuberculosis...
...Anatomically and physically," one scientist writes, "the insect type has great advantage over the human type...
...It is this unconscious wisdom, and not their "superior" outer skeleton or their fecundity or their speedy adaptation to changing environments, that has caused insects to multiply and flourish from the steaming jungles to the tundras of the Far North...
...Human ingenuity has devised machines that fly more swiftly than the locust, machines that can cover the ground more rapidly than tarantulas, machines that can dig deeper and faster than the digger wasp, machines that can carry men encased in armour more impenetrable than the armour of a stag beetle, machines that can flit over the sea more swiftly than a water spider, and poison gases so potent that if universally applied they could wipe out not only their human inventors but the hundred thousand species of insects that presumptuously challenge the benign overlordship of man...
...A good example of protective mimicry, a device used by insects or beasts to escape the attention of enemies or to hide in ambush for prey...
...For purposes of its own, it had chosen to roost on the stemless leaf, and had immediately endowed its refuge with the lost part...
...By protruding its long body and feelers over the leaf edge, it had created an exact replica of the missing stem...
...perhaps because it betrayed a slight motion when all the rest of the woods was frozen in calm...
...More people are killed by people than are killed by insect parasites...
...If in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years the locusts drone in black clouds oyer the grave of human civilization, it will only be beeause mankind betrayed its heritage of intelligence and chose the darkness of oblivion though it had in its grasp the power to lift itself to the stars...
...Those who believe the insects will rout man cite other marvels...
...Save in the case of the warrior ants, no insect carries forward mass extermination of its own species...
...Why it claimed my interest I do not know...
...Moreover, so perfectly did the insect match the leaf in color that at a distance of a few feet it was invisible...
...This, of course, is not the case...
...The argument of insect superiority is year by year losing its force...
...We could control our destiny without fear that the ants, termites, grasshoppers, and beetles would inherit our fallen empire...
...As I studied it, I was struck by the unusual thickness of the stem, and even as I reached to examine the oddity, the stem separated itself from the rest of the leaf and walked away on six long, hinged, ungainly legs...
...More people are killed by people in a year of modern war than were killed by locusts in a year of the worst plagues of history...
...Humans Know How The theory is attractive, but offers loopholes...
...They can, for purposes of attack or self-preservation, belong to a dozen varied "sets," clubs, churches or lodges and in each take on the color and texture of their immediate surroundings...
...And as I marveled at the walking stick and its power to simulate chlorophyl or to sit on a dead limb for motionless hours and take on the form of a knotty, brown twig, I again thought of a scientist's prediction that the insect, more versatile in adapting itself to changing environments, will eventually dominate and make men and mules vanish from the face of the earth...
...The chameleon has no copyright on its specialized magic...
...Homo sapiens has weapons more amazing than anything possessed by any other living form, but the blindness and the tragedy lies in the suicidal uses to which they are put...
...And more people are periodically starved to death by a deranged man-made economic system than are starved to death by the fruit fly, the corn borer, the cutworm, and the bollweevil, It is the insane urge toward self-destruction that we have to face and to fear, not the growth in the insect census...
Vol. 8 • June 1944 • No. 26
