122 Life and Immortality. 



purple have assumed a richer hue and blaze like a coronet 

 of rubies. When at rest, with the rings all bunched and 

 body shortened, the infantile Luna is as thick as a man's 

 thumb, measuring but two inches in linear direction; but 

 when she sets out upon her travels, feeling the dignity of her 

 station in life, she stretches to her full length of three 

 inches. 



When have been completed her allotted days of feeding 

 upon the leaves of the hickory, oak, walnut or sweet gum, 

 and she is seriously contemplating the preparing of a shroud 

 and casket in which to await her resurrection-morn, she casts 

 about for leaves, which, when they are found, she securely 

 ^raws together, and within the hollow space there is soon 

 spun a very close and strong oval cocoon of silk, one and 

 three-fourths inches in length, of chestnut-brown color, thin, 

 and covered with warts and excrescences, but seldom showing 

 the imprints of leaves. Cocoons of Luna so nearly resemble 

 those of polyphemus, that many an experienced collector 

 is greatly chagrined, after getting together a large supply 

 of what he deems Luna cocoons, to find dusky, one-eyed 

 polyphemi to issue from the silken tombs rather than a 

 goodly throng, in delicate bridal attire, of proud empresses 

 of the night. Polyphemus cocoons are, however, somewhat 

 smaller than Lunas, white or dirty-white in color, rounded 

 at each end, and sometimes angular, because of the leaves 

 being unevenly moulded into their surfaces, and generally 

 covered with a whitish meal-like powder. 



In June the Lunas awake from their death-like slumber, 

 burst asunder their silken cerements, having at first made 

 loose the compact threads by a fluid-ejection, and come out 

 into the world in all the freshness and glory of a new and 

 untried existence. Their wings, which expand from four and 

 three-fourths to five and one-half inches, are of a delicate 

 light-green color, the hinder ones being prolonged into a tail 

 of an inch and a half or more in length. Along the anterior 

 margin of the fore-wings is a broad purple-brown stripe, 



