STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 85 



branch of the food plant of the caterpillars. The lunas feed 

 almost entirely on gray birches, the polyphemus and cecropias 

 also feed on those but they will feed on others — the cecropias 

 will feed on almost any kind of a fruit tree. Then put these 

 little caterpillars or the eggs in there and let them feed on 

 those leaves until the leaves are nearly all eaten ; then you can 

 transfer them to some other branch. It takes them only about 

 six weeks to grow, so that you can raise a great many in a 

 short time. There is one very interesting way to catch the 

 male moths. If you can find a cocoon and hatch a female moth, 

 then put her in a wire cage and set it near an open window, 

 and leave the window open all night if you don't want to sit 

 up all night and watch theni. We tried it one night with the 

 polyphemus. 1 read in a book somewhere of a man that caught 

 twenty-seven in one night and I thought that was an almost 

 improbable story. But two years ago we tried that one night 

 and we had sixty-five the next morning, by actual count, of 

 these great moths all over the room. And about that same time 

 in one night we caught twenty-four of the lunas. I don't want 

 you to think we killed them all by wholesale because we only 

 saved a fe\v of the best and let the rest go. 



Here is an arrangement that we call a nature picture, — insects 

 arranged with grasses and flowers so as to make it look a 

 little more natural as if they were flying around. A good many 

 people keep their insects on pins but somehow there is a rather 

 unpleasant feeling about that. Sometimes we make them up 

 in large pictures in a common picture frame, perhaps a yard 

 square. You can make beautiful pictures that way and make 

 them look quite natural. If we could only have the life his- 

 tories of these common insects especially, in our rural schools, 

 so the childrA could learn these, it would be of the greatest 

 value. Now children will hear you tell about these brown- 

 tails and about their being poisonous, but they don't know 

 about them. At our Pomological meeting at Waterville. I 

 think, two or three years ago, I was talking with the school 

 children there and one little girl told me that some one told her 

 if a brown-tail moth bit her she would die and that girl was 

 living in daily fear. She didn't know what a brown-tail was, 

 and didn't know that a moth couldn't bite any way, and there 

 she was living in fear that if that moth bit her she would die. 



