ATTACUS PROMETHEA 237 



we were inexperienced then and did not test them by 

 weight and the " thud " when shaken, so we carried 

 them all home and then began cutting them open very 

 carefully to see the pupse. Great was our disappoint- 

 ment on finding that most of them contained dried-up 

 larvae, cylindrical bundles of tiny parasitic cocoons, 

 and empty pupa-skins from which the parasites had 

 already escaped — probably in the autumn. From all 

 the mass of cocoons we got but twenty or thirty sound 

 pupae. Still these were enough for our purposes, and 

 when the moths emerged in June we found it easy to 

 get all the eggs we wanted, each female laying between 

 two and four hundred. 



The eggs were ovoid, pinkish white, stained with 

 brown, and were laid in single rows. They hatched 

 twelve days later, toward night. The caterpillars ate 

 their way out of the end of the shells and then crawled 

 away from them as fast as possible, in a long proces- 

 sion up the stem to the tip of an ash-leaf, then to the 

 top of the tin. Their heads were black, with a whitish 

 stripe across the front, and a very yellow band at the 

 back. Their bodies were yellow ringed with black, 

 and had sparse black setae. The legs and props were 

 horn-colored and very conspicuous. The anal end 

 grew black. The crawlers arranged themselves in 

 rows on ash-leaves and ate eagerly. Six days after 

 hatching they showed six rows of black tubercles, 

 each having setae spreading from its top. Just be- 

 hind the head was a transverse row, or crest, of five 

 larger tubercles, and on the second and third seg- 

 ments was a large tubercle on each side of the dorsal 

 line. 



