INTRODUCTION 



CHAPTER I 



THE LIFE-HISTORY AND ANATOMY OF MOTHS 



; I suppose you are an entomologist ? " 



"Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the 

 individual entitled to that name. No man can be truly called an entomologist, 

 sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp." 



Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table. 



The great order of the scale-winged insects, or lepidoptera, 

 by the consent of almost all naturalists has been subdivided into 

 two suborders, the Rhopalocera, or Butterflies, and the Hetero- 

 cera, or Moths. As Dr. David Sharp well says, "The only 

 definition that can be given of Heterocera is the practical one that 

 all Lepidoptera that are not butterflies are Heterocera."* 



The distinction made between butterflies and moths, accord- 

 ing to which all lepidoptera having clubbed antennae are to be 

 classified as Rhopalocera, or butterflies, and those without 

 clubbed antenna? are to be classified as Heterocera, or moths, 

 while holding good in the main, yet is found with the increase 

 of our knowledge to have exceptions, and there are a few fami- 

 lies of lepidoptera, apparently forming con- 

 necting links between the butterflies and the 

 moths, in which, while most of the structural 

 characteristics are those of the Heterocera, the 

 antennas are distinctly clubbed. This is true 

 of the Castniidce, found in tropical America, Fig. i.- Dahlia 

 the Neocastniidce of the Indo-Malayan region, stechcn^ 

 the Euschemontdce of Australia, and certain 

 obscure genera of the Agaristidce, among them that remarkable 

 insect, Dahlia hesperioides Pagenstecher, which occurs in the 



*Cambridge Natural History, Vol. VI. p. 366. 



