Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 October 1898 — With Numberless Eyes. [ARTICLE]

With Numberless Eyes.

To say that a person “has eyes in the back of hia head” has long been a recognized way of paying a high compliment to his powers of observing everything going on around him. But the phrase when applied to insects becomes, as naturalists are well aware, simply a statement of facts. Indeed, considering that very many insects indulge in eyes by the thousand, the head of a horsefly, for example, being literally made up of eyes alone, it would be strange if some of them had not to be relegated to the back of their owners’ headr.

Thus it is said that if an ordinary dragon fly wore placed in the center of a globe he could see every part of it at once without moving his head. And this insect, though possessing about 20,000 eyes, is a long way from being the moJit liberally endowed in this respect, the mordella beetle, for instance, comfortably beating him by some 5,000.

These eyes often give off prismatic colors, and under the microscope are very beautiful objects, looking like a section of honeycomb. That each individual eye of the many thousand has its perfect lens ’system is proved by the fact that each makes a separate picture of any object placed before it. Of course, a microscope is required to see these pictures, but they are very distinct and aro known to microscopists as the “multiple image.”