TRIFID^. 55 



plants— asparagus, clock, groundsel, knot-grass, yellow iris, 

 scarlet geranium, clover, thistles, potato, Stachys syhatica, 

 Serratula tmctoria, Scdum telephmm, Petasitis officinalis, and 

 many others ; also occasionally upon leaves of hazel, poplar, 

 lime, and alder; feeding both by day and by night, and 

 sometimes eating voraciously in the sunshine. 



Pupa large and stout, but with a thin and delicate skin ; 

 the portion in front of the head, covering the mouth, sharply 

 angulated, almost beaked, tipped with black; wing ^ and 

 limb covers rather compact, brilliantly glossy and devoid of 

 sculpture ; but the back of the corselet thickly inscribed with 

 fine lines, channels, and pits ; dorsal and abdominal segments 

 smooth and shining ; anal segment very bluntly rounded off ; 

 cremaster thick and short, wrinkled, black, furnished with 

 two strong straight black spikes ; remainder of the surface 

 rich chestnut-red. In a hard but brittle cocoon of earth 

 apparently without admixture of silk, under the surface of 

 the ground. 



The moth is rarely if ever seen in the daytime. Probably 

 it hides among herbage and fallen leaves. At rather late 

 dusk it comes readily to sugar and ivy-bloom, or after hyber- 

 nation occasionally to sallow-bloom ; and it is at this season 

 that it pairs and deposits its eggs. Its appearance when at 

 sugar, or sitting, as it sometimes will at night, on the trunk 

 of a tree, is precisely that of a short bit of brown stick. Its 

 squared shoulders and wings wrapped closely to the body, 

 even squeezed together and crumpled behind, together with 

 its drab and smoky-brown colouring, make the resemblance 

 extraordinary, and it is even heightened by the marking of 

 the blackened reniform stigma, which appears precisely like 

 a knot on the side of the supposed piece of stick. Apparently 

 found throughout England, though usually scarce or very 

 local in the southern counties. It has, however, been taken 

 commonly in the Dartmoor district of Devon, in the Cam- 

 bridgeshire fens, and sometimes in Oxfordshire, Berks, and 



