356 Miscellaneous. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 



ON DIFFERENT TISSUES THE WORK OF INSECTS. 



In the * Compte Rendu ' of the sitting of the Academy of the 1 9th 

 August of this year, there is an extract from a letter of M. Levasseur, 

 who forwarded a piece of a very fine tissue, a kind of cloth made by 

 caterpillars, which was found in Moravia. This extract has occa- 

 sioned two other communications on similar facts, the one observed 

 by Count Saumeray, near Blois ; the other by M. Delahaye, libra- 

 rian to the city of Amiens. 



Reaumur in the second volume of his Memoirs mentioned the 

 caterpillars which make these tissues. They are the species of Moths 

 which entomologists have included in the family Yponomeutida, a 

 name meant to indicate the habits of these caterpillars, which live con- 

 gregated together in vast numbers under a common tent, and which, 

 when they remove, weave for themselves galleries or covered ways, 

 in order to be sheltered and to escape the too strong light and heat 

 of the sun, and at the same time thus preserve themselves from the 

 moisture of the atmosphere and the voracity of birds. They advance 

 successively upon the different branches of certain trees, which they 

 entirely strip of their leaves, leaving upon their track the tapestries 

 which defended them ; it is under this protecting cloth that each of 

 the caterpillars weaves itself a small cocoon about the size of a 

 barleycorn. In some cases these cocoons are separated, isolated and 

 vertically suspended from the cloth which forms the roof of their tent ; 

 and in others, all these caterpillars assemble when they are ready to 

 undergo their metamorphosis, so that in this case their chrysalises 

 and their envelopes form a circular mass of follicles pressed together. 



The species which are most known by their ravages and by the 

 Irtrge extent of their woven fabrics, which always depends on the 

 magnitude of the number of individuals which have made them, are 

 those which naturalists have designated under the names of the 

 plants which they seem to prefer, and which, with the termination 

 which Linnaeus appropriated to all moths, have become their specific 

 names, such as Evonymella, Padella, Cognatella, Echiella, Sedella, &c., 

 according as they feed on the leaves of the spindle tree, the bird- 

 cherry, the service-tree, the quince, the whitethorn, the orpine. 



M. Duponchel has described and drawn nine species of this genus 

 in vol. vii. of the 'Nocturnal Lepidoptera of France' in plates 285 

 and 286. 



MM. Audouin, Edwards, and Dumeril, are clearly of opinion that 

 the tissues sent by MM. Levasseur and de Saumeray, are the work of 



