194 r February, 



who has also followed the history of these larvae in the place I have 

 cited in the Memoires de I'Academie des Sciences de Suede,* said that 

 they fed on many sorts of eatables, as lard, butter, and dried meat, and 

 for that reason they willingly dwell in the larder, and in the offices. 

 He has seen them eat butter and lard with avidity. He has also rubbed 

 all the body with lard and with butter, without their having appeared 

 to suffer injury ; one knows that the ordinary larvae are suffocated, as 

 soon as one stops their spiracles with oil or some other greasy matter. 

 But M. Eolander has remarked, that the larvae are able to hide their 

 spiracles in folds of the skin, to avoid their being wetted and stopped 

 by the greasy materials which surround them." 



" He does not say that he has seen them reside in coverings in 

 form of fixed tubes ; he appears not to have known, that M. de Eeaumur 

 had before spoken of these larvae under the name of ' fausses teignes 

 des cuirs,' because they inhabit a fixed sheath : for he said they had not 

 been described by any author." 



Now, after my recent experience, the foregoing extracts afford me 

 most convincing evidence, that Rolander was not really acquainted 

 with the larva until it had ceased feeding, and I think I shall presently 

 prove this ; and I can only suppose that he must have somehow deceived 

 himself in imagining that which he asserted of its food, and of its 

 spiracles, ingeniously suiting the one to the other ; but it seems some- 

 thing more strange, that for more than a hundred years, all authors 

 who have written on the Pyralides have gone on copying the above, and 

 commenting on it as one of the ^iock facts in this branch of Natural 

 History. 



To return to the record of my experience with the eggs sent me 

 by Mr. Fletcher, when I received them on 11th of August, they were 

 only just in time, as two of them hatched in the evening of that day, 

 and five more the next day ; I put the larvae at first on a little of the 

 barn sweepings in a glass-to])ped box, in order to observe, if they fed 

 at all, what they would choose ; for these sweepings consisted of a 

 variety of things, such as husks of wheat and of oats, small fragments 

 of straw and of Gladium thatch, also of the pods of beans, small seeds 

 of various plants, short bits of grass and other dried stems, some 

 woolly dust, and a few empty pupa skins in cases of some small species 

 of Lepidoptera, all mixed up together with much chaffy and earthy 

 matter. 



Into this mixture the active little creatures at once went down 

 out of sight, and did not show themselves at all while they remained 



* Rolander, M6m. de I'Acad. do Suede, Ann , 1775, p. 61, Tab. 2. 



