110 Bugs, Butterflies, and Beetles 



pupas of many have a curious jug-handle to them. 

 This jug-handle (Fig. 97) is really the case which 

 holds and protects the long tongue of the moths, or 

 the hum-bugs, as the children call them. Among 

 the naturalists they are known as the hawk moths 

 or Sphinx moths (Fig. 98). 



The reason they call them the Sphinx moths 

 is because the caterpillar rears up its head so that 

 it reminded Carolus Linnseus, the naturalist, of the 

 big stone sphinx head sticking out of the sand in 

 Egypt. The caterpillar is a large green crawler, 

 which grows as thick as one's finger and three 

 inches or more in length and reaches its full growth 

 between the middle of August and the first of 

 September (Fig. 96) ; then it crawls down the plant 

 and buries itself in the ground, where it changes 

 to the " httle brown jug " form shown in Fig. 97. 



The funny part about these changes which all 

 caterpillars are in the habit of making is that they 

 all occur inside the skin, then the outside skin 

 breaks and a new creature, entirely unlike the old 

 one, wriggles out of the crack, just as the butter- 

 fly comes out of the skin of the chrysalis. 



There are a number of moths belonging to the 

 jug-handle family but some have short handles 



