44.8 TROPICAL WILD LIFE IN BRITISH GUIANA 



the strange circumstances in which she herself has placed 

 them. 



Let us see what has happened to the larva that has bur- 

 rowed beneath the surface of the ground. Why must such 

 an active creature entomb itself again upon being liberated 

 from its original prison ? 



Unlike ourselves or animals and birds, insects pass 

 through a series of stages, one might say, almost by jumps. 

 At first we have an egg, quite helpless, but deposited with 

 due care and forethought by its provident bearer. In a day . 

 or so, this helpless egg has become a ten-ringed maggot with 

 a head, appendages for drawing in its food and possessed of 

 a primitive but efficient set of organs. It is not an actual 

 hatching as we see it in a hen's egg that has brought this 

 strange creature into the world, but a fading of egg into 

 maggot. There is no empty shell when the process is finished, 

 no spectre of the creature's former self. The process is like 

 that of a moving picture which fades before one's eyes from 

 one scene to the next which is widely different. 



In its newly acquired form, the insect feeds as we have 

 seen upon the vermillion-nut pulp, remaining unchanged 

 except in size, until fate releases it upon the moist forest 

 floor, when with a haste that is almost frantic it immediately 

 imprisons itself once more, this time in the ground wherever 

 it chances to find itself. Forty-eight hours later we discover 

 it as a tiny yellow keg banded with red stitches, as though it 

 had buried itself for good in a self-fashioned coffin. 



Has the insect become so accustomed to the blackness 

 of prison life that it cannot live in a world of sunlight? Must 

 it live the life of a mole because it has only once seen the 

 brightness of day? No, there is a far deeper reason than 

 these that send it so hastily into the ground. It is about to 

 undergo its last and greatest transformation, one during 

 which it will be once more utterly helpless against the slight- 

 est odds. It must lie very still as though in death, lest the 



