Gulliver Man and His Lilliputian Enemies
Once upon a time a baby was born. It was a very, very small baby, and almost too feeble to move. Yet, the very first day of its life, it ate two hundred times its own weight. As long as it lived it ate as greedily as that. It was nearly all mouth and stomach. Every day or two it outgrew its own skin. The skin split down the back, the baby crawled out in a new and larger skin, and went right on eating. It seemed never to sleep. In a few weeks it changed its skin five times. When it was grown up it was ten thousand times as big as when it was born.
What a monster! If this were a human baby, it would have eaten a pile of food as big as a ton of coal the first day. And, when fully grown, it would have weighed one hundred thousand pounds. Is this a giant story, like that of the Brob'ding-nag'ians in Gulliver's Travels? No, it's a really, truly story, but the monster babies are more like the Lilliputians. They were the tiny people, who swarmed all over Gulliver when he was asleep, and tied him up tight with cobwebs or something. Our Lilliputian enemies are caterpillars and grubs. They are hatched, many of them, from pinhead eggs, and they grow to hundreds and even thousands of times as big as when they come out of the eggs.
"Once upon a time" is right now, and all the time. You can find these monster babies on every lawn, in every garden and park and farm, on the grass, on small plants and big trees; buried in soft fruits and hard grains, and in tunnels they have bored in roots and stems and tree trunks. You can see their fathers and mothers flying in the air, too. They are beautiful butterflies and moths, shiny beetles and gauzy-winged flies. How pretty they are, and they don't seem to be doing any harm at all.
So long as they have wings few insects eat much, and most of them live only a short time. But the females are busy laying eggs. That little gray moth, half an inch across the wings, that you see hovering over the pink apple blossoms, lays an egg that hatches into the apple worm. The fat white grub eats its way through, spoils the apple and crawls out. It spins a rough cocoon, just the color of the tree, and under a scale of bark. There it lies all winter, coming out as a moth, in the spring, to lay more eggs in the blossoms, to spoil more apples.
