44 BUTTERFLIES 



fly goes through in the course of its life. You find on a 

 tree or shrub a wormlike caterpillar. You take it in 

 charge, placing it in a box or jar where you can provide 

 leaves for its food and soon it either spins around itself a 

 silken shroud, thus hiding from your sight, or else it simply 

 seems to change to a lifeless object without eyes or wings 

 or legs, unable to move about and motionless, save for a 

 slight wriggle when you touch it. Yet if you keep the 

 shroud or the mummy-like object for two or three weeks you 

 are likely to see a beautiful moth come from the shroud 

 or a glorious butterfly break out of the mummy case. 

 (See plate, page ^9.) So you can get the realest kind of 

 moving pictures by simply bringing in the caterpillars that 

 are easily found in garden, field, and wood. 



To collect these caterpillars it is only necessary to be 

 provided with a pair of sharp eyes and an empty coffee can 

 or some other form of tin box. Go out into the garden or 

 along the borders of the woods. Look carefully. If you 

 see places where leaves have been eaten, search the leaves 

 near by and you are lil^ely to find one or more of the cater- 

 pillars that caused the injury. Transfer them to the box 

 and take them home with a few leaves of the food plant. 

 There place them in some form of vivarium, which simply 

 means a box or cage in which you can keep living creatures. 



The most satisfactory cages for rearing caterpillars are 

 those which are open above so that there is not even a 

 glass plate between the observer and the insect. This 

 kind of vivarium is easily made by using a band of some 

 sticky substance like the tree tanglefoot with which trees 

 are commonly banded, or a strip of sticky fly paper. Any 

 wide shallow box may be used by simply placing an inch- 

 wide band of the sticky material around the vertical sides 



