44 THE EEPORT OF THE Xo. 36 



birds; magpies, jays, green woodpeckers, wrynecks, bottle-tits, goat-suckers; in- 

 doors and out, tame tbings galore; rabbits and hares, rats, mice (white mice, field 

 mice, dormice), doves, canaries, love-birds, toucans, and — most fascinating of 

 all — silkworms. 



Our cousins had trays and trays of these grey caterpillars fed with fresh 

 leaves every day from the mulberry tree on the lawn. To watch these creatures 

 feed and grow and moult, to see each one taken when it stopped feeding and 

 put into a paper twirl or " poke " — a miniature cornucopia, to watch them spin 

 their cocoon, and then to assist at the business of tearing away the rough outer 

 scaffolding of yellow strands and fluff, pick out an end from the close-wound 

 cocoon, set the cocoon in a glass of water and reel onto a skein-winder the whole 

 interminable thread of golden silk, the cocoon bobbing about on the surface of 

 the water in the glass, till finally the newly formed pupa sank through the last 

 meshes of its hammock, and was put carefully away in dry bran for the moth to 

 emerge ; to see the moth lay its eggs, one after another, side by side, in batches on 

 a sheet of paper spread over the bottom of the box, eggs that soon darkened 

 from creamy color to leaden gray ; all this was enchantment and we were soon 

 bound fast under the spell. A whole room was devoted to the work, and iti? 

 curtains and walls were hung with these inverted paper cones of spinning and 

 13upating caterpillars. 



The rage for silkworms travelled back to Perthshire that September on the 

 Scotch express, to spread like influenza: not only did we send next spring to a 

 London dealer in Natural History supplies, for some batches of eggs, but bit 

 some of our particular friends with the mania, so that a silkworm cult was 

 established in the Town of Crieff. 



I am afraid the industry never throve; for one thing the mulberry does 

 not grow in Scotland, and although lettuces make a fair substitute, the cater- 

 pillars are smaller and less hardy, so that quite a high mortality ensues between 

 egg and adult. But we made, I remember, some interesting discoveries. In the 

 first place, we devised quite an original form of incubator to coax the grub out 

 of the egg a few weeks earlier than the natural season. We began by keeping 

 the eggs on the kitchen mantelpiece just over a good fire that was always going; 

 l)ut presently, too impatient to wait, we tried putting some of the egg hatches into 

 tlie warm — almost— hot oven; the success of this experiment was almost too great, 

 for the specks of grubs hurried out to feed before the lettuce got up from its 

 bed in the garden to be fed on. It was at this time that we made our second 

 discovery of dandelion leaves as a substitute for lettuce. The supreme result 

 of keeping silkworms, however, was that it decided my brother and me to begin 

 a collection of insects. 



Several seasons earlier I had tried rearing some of my favorite woolly-bears, 

 which I found feeding on dockleaves. This had been so far successful that I 

 understood the connection of caterpillars with moths and butterflies, and the 

 mystery of the chrysalis. And after my woolly-bears had been transformed to 

 gorgeous tiger moths, I had gathered from the garden all the caterpillars I could 

 find on cabbages, currant bushes and so on. But I must have been too young 

 to collect systematically, for I don't think it ever occurred to me to keep the 

 imago after its emergence. Two incidents of this earlier experience come back 

 to me ; one, how I watched a green caterpillar of the smaller white butterfly, 

 when full grown, spin its little Imtton and sling of silk and contract as though 

 about to pupate. A day or two after when I looked for the chrysalis I found 



