THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
Vou. XII.) FEBRUARY, 1879. [No. 189. 
ATTACUS ATLAS: A LIFE-HISTORY. 
By Puinre Henry Gosse, F.R.S. 
Tuer Great Atlas Moth of farther Asia, the vastest of all 
known Lepidoptera, has always, with me,—at least since I began 
to collect and study Insects, now more than six and forty years 
ago,—been invested with a halo of romance; and to rear it 
through its various stages,—egg, caterpillar, pupa, imago,—this 
seemed too grand a vision to come within the range of hope, if 
hope is truly defined as desire with expectation. There was the 
desire, indeed, but the expectation was nil. 
When I returned to England from America, in 1839, I saw, 
hawked about in the streets of London, (what doubtless my 
readers have often seen, for it is common enough, as I afterwards 
found),—a case of Chinese insects. <A box, lacquered, and gilded, 
and glazed, crammed as full as it could hold, with insects of all 
Orders, and in the midst a noble Attacus Atlas, in perfect 
condition, a female stretching more than nine inches in expanse 
of wing, of the variety y of the Brit. Mus. Catal. p. 1219. That 
very specimen I still possess. I bought the whole case, threw 
away the herd of plebeian beetles and bugs, retaining only a few 
of the finer Papilionide as satellites to Atlas, re-papered and 
re-furbished the box, making it hermetically tight, with such 
success that the lapse of forty years has not produced the 
slightest trace of mite-dust on the paper beneath the heavy- 
bodied Moth. Barring a little fading of the rich red and brown 
hues, the specimen is as perfect as it was then. 
I do not mean to represent the acquisition of this example as 
any special achievement in science; it was but to myself the first 
incident in the history which I come to narrate. Kven then the 
E 
