LACE-WING LARVA. 281 



Looking now upon the lace-wing in its earliest shape of 



animation, that of larva a flat, wingless, six-legged crawler, 



wanting only size to make it frightful as well as hideous we 



exclaim, " Can it be possible that an object so unsightly can 



contain within it the germs of grace and beauty ?" Even so ; 



and here, when without disguise "fierce" but not yet "fair" 



we behold the wolf of aphides playing havoc amongst these flocks 



of foliage, which, with more than lamb-like passiveness, permit 



themselves to be individually picked out and slaughtered by 



their terrible but apparently undreaded enemy, to her their 



green pellucid bodies, filled with saccharine juice, are so many 



honey-pots, which she knows well the trick of emptying (at 



the rate of three in half a minute) by means of her imperforate 



as well as pointed jaws. When thus reduced to skins, the 



spoils of victim aphides are frequently observed so heaped up 



around their destroyer as to seem purposely collected to serve 



it for a cover a proceeding which Kirby has illustrated by 



comparing it to that of Hercules in clothing himself with the 



skin of the INemean lion. That the skins of aphides are 



really employed by the grub of the lace-wing as a covering is 



indeed a fact sufficiently established by an experiment of 



Reaumur, who, on putting one of these creatures under a glass 



case with a silken cocoon and raspings of paper, found it 



convert both materials successively into similar cloaks of 



concealment. 



When our wolf of aphis flocks assumes the second form of 



