Tales of magicians and sorcerers grow pale beside the reports of scientists who have studied the insect world and its billions and billions of inhabitants. For the insect world is a believe-it-or-not world where some creatures look like tiny monsters all scales and spikes and horns. Some look more like queer machines than living things. And others are as lovely as fairy blossoms.

In All about the Insect World Dr. Ferdinand C. Lane gives a vivid account of the amazing variety of six-legged creatures that aid and torment man from air, sea and land. His own studies and observations of the insect world have taken him into many out-of-the-way places where exotic butterflies and grotesque beetles live their strange life cycles.

Now he gives a first-hand report of some of the most interesting and startling of our present-day insects. There is the beetle so tiny that it can crawl through the eye of a fine needle, and its cousin so large that its outspread legs would cover a good-sized plate. There is the termite queen which may live fifty years and the Mayfly which lives only one day. There is the sexton beetle that buries dead creatures, laying her eggs in the grave . . . the moth with a wingspread of fourteen inches . . . the dragonfly whose eyes may have as many as 25,000 lenses . . . and bees which "air-condition" their homes.

Together they tell a fascinating story of the insect world where some 700,000 species amaze and baffle mankind.

From the dust jacket