CONTROLLED PUPATION 81 



habitat, that has brought about a deviation from the rule. In short, 

 the young flies may hasten or postpone pupation at will! I would 

 have hesitated to set forth such a statement, even as a remote possi- 

 bility, were it not for my experiments that cannot be denied. One 

 learns to expect the unexpected in nature, but who would go so far 

 as to accuse her of running even so tiny a creature as this nascent 

 fly, without a schedule? She is forced to surrender here to conditions 

 self-imposed. If her children within the vermilion-nut lie impris- 

 oned without food for a fortnight or more, it matters not. When re- 

 lease comes they are none the worse for their experience. If they 

 are spilled roughly on the ground from a freshly broken nut a month 

 before their brothers, so much the better. They have no set time for 

 pupation. They will become flies just the same. Thus Nature has 

 endowed them with ability to meet successfully, the strange circum- 

 stances in which she herself has placed them. 



Let us see what has happened to the larva that has burrowed be- 

 neath the surface of the ground. Why must such an active creature 

 entomb itself again upon being liberated from its original prison? 



Unlike ourselves, animals or birds, insects pass through a series of 

 stages, one might say, almost by jumps. At first we have an egg, quite 

 helpless, but deposited with due care and forethought by its provident 

 bearer. In a day or so, this helpless egg has become a ten-ringed 

 maggot with a head, appendages for drawing in its food and possessed 

 of a primitive but efficient set of organs. It is not an actual hatching 

 as we see it in a hen's egg that has brought this strange creature into 

 the world, but a fading of egg into maggot. There is no empty shell 

 when the process is finished, no specter of the creature's former self. 

 The process is like that of a moving picture, which fades before one's 

 eyes from one scene to the next, which is widely different. 



In its newly acquired form, the insect feeds, as we have seen, upon 

 the vermilion-nut pulp, remaining unchanged except in size, until 



