82 INSECT BEHAVIOR 



fate releases it upon the moist forest floor, when with a haste that is 

 almost frantic it immediately imprisons itself once more, this time 

 in the ground wherever it chances to find itself. Forty-eight hours 

 later, we discover it as a tiny yellow keg, banded with red stitches, 

 as though it had buried itself for good in a self-fashioned coffin. 



Has the insect become so accustomed to the blackness of prison life 

 that it cannot live in a world of sunlight? Must it live the life of a 

 mole because it has only once seen the brightness of day? No, there 

 is a far deeper reason than these, that sends it so hastily into the 

 ground. It is about to undergo its last and greatest transformation, 

 one during which it will be once more utterly helpless against the 

 slightest odds. It must lie very still, as though in death, lest the 

 beautiful process within be interrupted and the design shattered. 



Up to now, the insect has resembled its ancestral family, less highly 

 developed worm-like creatures of another day. Just as we have de- 

 veloped from less perfect creatures, so has the fly. Within the 

 little yellow keg a wonderful change is in process. 



At first the maggot, so recently an active definite creature, is seized 

 upon by a host of nature's strangest forces. We cannot see them or 

 give them any definite form. Nevertheless they are there, like a 

 great group of wreckers, carpenters, masons, painters and decorators. 

 The larva or maggot, the ancestral form, is torn down and reduced 

 to a disintegrated mass of fluid. From this utter wreck of what was 

 so lately a crawling, organized creature, the final insect is resur- 

 rected. From old tissues, new ones spring, from what was old and 

 out of date, a more modern creature is erected. The yellow keg is no 

 longer a coffin, but a factory wherein a host of raw materials are 

 to be transformed into the finished product! 



The process is comparable to tearing down an old-fashioned house 

 and erecting a modern one on the old foundations. Much of the 

 old material is used, and that which must be replaced by new, is 



