The Moths and Butterflies 



43 1 



from injury by the moth, so he kills his thousands of pupae by dropping 

 the cocoons into boiling water or by putting them into a hot oven. Then, 

 after cleaning away the loose fluffy silk of the outside, he finds the beginning 

 of the long thread which makes the cocoon, and with a' clever little reeling- 

 machine he unwinds, unbroken, its hundreds of feet of merchantable silk floss. 

 From here to the silk-dress stage is a story not entomological, but one of 

 elaborate machines and processes of human devising. 



Hovering, humming-bird-like, in the early dusk over the deep flower- 

 cup of a petunia or honeysuckle or great jimson-weed, with its long flexible 

 proboscis thrust deep down to the nectaries, and the swift wings making a. 



FIG. 619. Larva of the achemon sphinx-moth, P 

 (After Lugger; natural size.) 



faint haze on either side of the trim body, the sphinx-moth, or hawk-moth, 

 or humming-bird moth, as variously called, is a familiar garden acquaintance. 

 But that he is but one of a hundred different American species; that he has 

 cousins red and cousins green, somber cousins and harlequin cousins; that, 

 strong- winged, clean-bodied, exquisitely painted, and honey-fine in his taste 

 as he is now, his earliest youth was passed as a "disgusting," soft, fat, green 

 tomato-worm or tobacco-worm or grape-vine dresser, and that at a later 

 adolescent period he lay buried in the ground, cased, mummy-like, in a dark- 

 brown sarcophagus all this may not be as familiar. Still, excepting the 

 giant silkworm-moths, the Saturnians, no other moth group is so much 

 affected by collectors and crawlery proprietors as the Sphingidae. Thus 

 the various adolescent stages of several hawk-moth species are known to 



