to be consideird as indigenous, 155 



may have been attached to some piece of wood or other 

 matter by the parent moth, which pieces of wood may have 

 been afterwards conveyed on board, and the ova hatched in 

 another hemisphere, is a gratuitous assumption, unwarranted 

 by experience of natural habits, not to mention the extreme 

 improbabihty of the larva being fehcitously landed, and 

 placed, just at the moment of its birth, in the enviable neigh- 

 bourhood of a potato field or a plant of tobacco. 



I must confess there is one avenue by which our insects 

 may have gained a footing in this country which it would 

 be uncandid not to avow, it being the only plausible mode of 

 accounting for their adventitious dissemination. One may con- 

 ceive it possible for the pupag to been have dug up by chance, 

 and conveyed in the mould employed to preserve the ger- 

 minating faculties of many North American trees and shrubs 

 whose seeds require such treatment ; or in the bog earth [heath 

 mould] sometimes brought over in ballast by our vessels, for 

 the use of the nurserymen. But the fact that these supposed 

 strangers have so often made their appearance, and that too 

 sometimes in pairs, unaccompanied, as far as I know, by 

 other North American species likely to have made them- 

 selves simultaneously visible, if such were their origin, renders 

 the above supposition extremely hypothetical. We concede, 

 also, the possibility of several extra-European specimens that 

 have once or twice solitarily occurred owing their intro- 

 duction to the zeal of insect disseminators ; but we cannot 

 persuade ourselves to ascribe a similar origin to such as have 

 repeatedly been captured, and that sometimes in pairs and in 

 the larva state. 



Speaking of »Sphin^ Carolina, Mr. Stephens says : — "The 

 simple fact of Mr. Atkinson's specimen having been reared 

 from the larva is not indicative of the native origin of the 

 species." Surely this is flying in the face of the strongest 

 evidence that can be adduced in favour of our insect clients. 



We have shown the almost physical impossibility of their 

 introduction as larvae, and we know that the major part at 

 least of the iSphing^W^ will not breed in confinement * : to 

 what then can we ascribe the discovery of the caterpillar at 

 large, if not to the spontaneous union of the species in a 



* This is too frequently the case with the larger Lepidoptera. Two 

 years ago I kept, at my lodgings in Paris, nearly twenty-five living speci- 

 mens of Sat. pyri, obtained from larvae found on elms, &c., around that 

 capital the preceding year ; and though the males were very active, espe- 

 cially at night, and had the full range of the apartment, I could never 

 accomplish my purpose of obtaining a stock of fertile eggs from the numerous 

 females associated with them. 1,::--;:. 



