LACKEY-MOTH. GHOST MOTH. 273 



Wiltshire, these caterpillars are reputed to do extensive damage; 

 and in Germany, woe to the lovers of sour-krout ! when this 

 lover of cabbages has visited thspotagere before them. There, 

 whole basketfuls of caterpillars are said, in innocent and igno- 

 rant simplicity, to be buried alive, only to rise, living, from 

 the earth ; for, as observed by Roesel, a native naturalist, one 

 might as well expect to kill a crab by covering it with sea- 

 water, as thus to destroy a caterpillar, which always burrows 

 under ground to change into a chrysalis. 



Among the destructives of orchard and kitchen-garden, 

 there is a race of very common brown Moths, yclept the 

 Lackeys, so called from the gaudy colouring of their cater- 

 pillars, variegated with stripes of blue, black, white, and 

 scarlet.* These, which are among the social feeders, are in 

 some seasons most egregious social pests, helping themselves, 

 something after the manner of the class they are named from, 

 to extravagant board, in return for making a destructive show. 



The hop-vine and the burdock are sometimes seen to droop 

 their leaves and stalks without any apparent cause. The 

 rational might suppose them fainting under the influence of 

 summer heat ; the ignorant imagine them struck by what they 

 call a blight; the fanciful would have declared, in days of 

 greater superstition, that they had been exposed to some " evil 

 eye " of ghost, or witch, or goblin ; and, as it happens, a ghost 

 is really at the bottom of the mystery, for a Ghost Motli^ in its 



* Clisiocampa Neustria. t Hepialus humuli. 



R 2 



