MOTIONS OF INSECTS. 299 



length ; of an oval form ; its colour was a semitrans- 

 parent brown, with a white opake band round the 

 middle. It was found attached, by one end, to the leaf 

 of a bramble. It repeatedly jumped out of an open 

 pill-box that was an incli in height. When put into a 



.drawer in which some other insects were impaled, it 

 skipped from side to side, passing- over their backs for 

 nearly a quarter of an hour with surprising- agility. 

 Its mode of springing seemed to be by balancing- itself 

 upon one extremity of its case. About the end of Oc- 

 tober one end of the case grew black, and from that 

 time the motion ceased; and about the middle of April, 

 in the following- year, a very minute ichneumon made 

 its appearance by a hole it had made at the opposite 

 end. — Some time after I had received this history, I 

 happened to have occasion to look at Reaumur's Me- 

 moir upon the enemies of caterpillars, where I met with 

 an account of a similar jumping- chrysalis, if not the 

 same. Round the nests of the processionary Bombyx, 

 before noticed % he found numerous little cocoons sus- 

 pended by a thread three or four inches long to a twig 

 or a leaf, of a shortened oval form, and close texture, 

 but so as the meshes might be distinguished. These 

 cocoons were rather transparent, of a coffee-brown co- 

 lour, and surrounded in the middle by a whitish band. 

 When put into boxes or glasses, or laid on the hand, 

 they surprised him by leaping. Sometimes their leaps 

 were not more than ten lines, at others they were 

 ejBitended to three or four inches, both in height and 

 length. When the animal leaps, it suddenly changes 

 its ordinary posture (in which the back is convex and 



^ Vol. I. 2d Ed. 4785 and above, p. '23. 



