out laying it down and picking it up again. When the ends are 

 evenly rounded and the sides curved to the proper depth, he draws 

 the edges and weaves them together without a seam. 



So nicely has he regulated his supply to his needs that the hairs 

 of his coat have just sufficed for the finished cocoon. He has toiled 

 with a thrift so admirable that the old coat, no longer needed, has 

 been remade into a sleeping bag, with no more than a few spears 

 left over for scraps. He is now naked as a plucked fowl and re- 

 duced like a shorn poodle. 



When we consider that this perfectly formed object, is the first 

 and only cocoon of the caterpillar, — that he has fashioned it without 

 model or experiment or experience or instruction, it gives us pause 

 in our own conceit ; and we wonder whether conscious intelligence is 

 so superior to "instinct" as some of us have been prone to think, or 

 whether that structure fashioned by the inherited genius of the cater- 

 pillar is not in some respects far more wonderful than measured 

 garment or raffia basket of human construction. 



His task over, his cocoon completed, our caterpillar relaxes the 

 hold of his "false" feet and lies Hmp and waiting. He is no longer 

 artist and weaver, but a helpless creature biding his time until the 

 convulsions of molting shall seize him again. 



While he waits he is shaped anew within, but when the strained 

 skin ruptures (this time not around the collar line, but in a tear down 

 the back along the three segments nearest the head) it is not a fresh 

 caterpillar that creeps forth; but a soft, wriggling object with six 

 legs, much longer than those he had before; wing-pads, quivering; 

 a long straight tongue, with a groping motion ; and two antennae. 

 For he is now a new-born pupa, bright reddish for awhile with 

 creamy yellow spots that show where tufts of hair had been rooted 

 before they were plucked out, and wine-red lumps that indicate the 

 false feet recently pulled from their last five-pairs of stockings. His 

 new appendages move feebly for a minute or two but they are useless 

 to him yet and are almost immediately glued fast to his body by the 

 fluid which has enabled him to slip out of his shorn skin and which 

 hardens on contact with the air in the cocoon. The dappled red and 

 cream coloring gives way in a few hours to the hard varnished 

 "pupa-brown" common to most kinds of moths. 



After about sixteen days of external quiet and internal reorgani- 

 zation, another molt is experienced— the last our insect undergoes, 

 for when the pupal shell cracks the emerging creature has com- 

 pleted its metamorphosis, and comes forth from the cocoon entirely 

 transformed. 



14 



