THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



But, though I have failed to gather from his works any information 

 upon this subject, I have learned from him personally, and by letter, 

 some facts which may be thought to throw some light upon this question. 

 About thirty-five years ago Mr. Scudder was prodding for beetles in some 

 hole of a rotten stump in winter at Williamstown, Mass., and came across 

 several caterpillars of Isabella, and breaking at least one in two found it 

 brittle, like an icicle, and he believes he noticed crystals within, and, 

 therefore took two or three home to his room to see if they would come 

 to life, which one or more did. Mr. Scudder, however, does not lay much 

 weight on these facts, and adds : "I may or may not have broken more 

 than one, and do not at all remember whether only one or all came to life, 

 but of course I may have broken only one, and that one already dead." 



I have recently seen somewhere, where I cannot now say, though I 

 have spent hours in searching for the reference, an account of a caterpillar 

 being found frozen into a cake of ice. The finder cut out a cube of the 

 ice containing the caterpillar by means of a red-hot poker, and then left 

 the block on the sill outside his window for several days, while the tem- 

 perature ranged below zero. Upon bringing it into the house and 

 thawing out the larva, it revived, and became quite active, but further 

 experiment was prevented by its spinning its cocoon. 



In Mr. Fletcher's report for 1889 (Fxperimental Farm Reports, 1889, 

 p. 79), it is recorded that four larvae of the Mediterranean Flour Moth 

 (Ephestia Kilhniella, Zeller) were placed in a glass vial out of doors for 

 half an hour when the temperature was only five degrees above zero F. , 

 and as a result were frozen hard, so that they " rattled like glass beads 

 against the sides of the bottle ". Of the four, two never recovered at all, 

 but the other two revived partially and retained their natural appearance 

 for about a fortnight, and moved their bodies a little, though they finally 

 succumbed. The Rev. T. W. Fyles has kindly given me the following 

 particulars of his experience with larvje of Coleoptera : " In the winter 

 of 1864-5, I was splitting up decaying hemlock logs in my pasture at 

 Iron Hill, P. Q., intending to burn them in the spring. On several 

 occasions I found in these logs numbers of the larvae of Orthosoma 

 unicolor in a torpid state. In some cases the water had percolated into 

 the burrows of the insects and frozen around their occupants. One day 

 I picked out a number of the largest grubs from their icy envelopments, 

 and found them rigid and seemingly lifeless. I took them to my house 

 and watched them as they slowly thawed into activity." 



