Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 November 1874 — Difference Between Bugs and Beetles. [ARTICLE]

Difference Between Bugs and Beetles.

A great many intelligent people do not understand the peculiar difference between the term “ bug” and “ beetle.” The popular impression is that a a beetle, and vice versa. Thomas Meehan writes, concerning this subject, that the Colorado potato beetle does not belong to the “ bug,” but to the “ beetle” family" There are many people who will say that it makes no difference whether we call this insect a bug or a beetle, so long as people know what we mean. In one sense this is right; yet it is the universal experience that inaccuracy is bound in time to make trouble. In fact, it is chiefly because of the general 4 slipkhod way of talking of things that writers and speakers find so much difficulty in being properly undersood. The use of wrong expressions because they are in the par- ■ ticular case “as good as the right one,” becomes a habit, and they are used when . they are not as good, and it is then that ■ the trouble comes in. In the case of i “ bug” and “beetle" there is little excuse

for the use of the Wrong term, as it caUnot be pleaded that “ beetle’ 1 is a “jaw-brcaking’”name. Beetle is quite as easy as the other. All those insects which have hard outer-wing eases are known to scientific men as coleoptera, and are popularly known as “ beetles.” The Colorado potato insect belongs to this class, and is a beetle, not a bug. The immature insect is the larva, and is as much if not more destructive than the parent beetle. A bedbug is not a beetle. —New York Herald.