12 DESTRUCTIVE INSECTS OF VICTORIA: 



found to endure intense cold without injury, and besides 

 some special and extraordinary instances, it has been 

 found by experiment that insect eggs may be exposed to 

 a temperature lower than that to which they are usually 

 subjected in this country (England), and cold enough to 

 solidify their contents without destroying their powers of 

 hatching. 



In a very few cases, insects are partly developed before 

 birth, otherwise, after hatching from the egg, or being 

 produced alive (in the same first stage of development) 

 by the female, insects pass their lives in three different 

 conditions or stages successively. 



The first is that in which they are known as maggots, 

 grubs, or caterpillars. In the case of grasshoppers, 

 cockroaches, and some other insects where the young are 

 very much the same shape as the parent, only without 

 wings, they usually go by the parents' name ; the young 

 of green-fly are sometimes known as "nits." In this state 

 they are active, voracious, and increase in size, and in this 

 first stage all insects are scientifically termed larvae. 



In the second stage, some orders of insects are usually 

 inactive and cannot feed, as is the case with the chrysalis 

 of the butterfly or moth, or the mummy-like form of the 

 beetle or wasp, with its limbs in distinct sheaths folded 

 down beneath. Some, however, are active and feed, as 

 grasshoppers, cockroaches, aphides (or green-fly), and 

 others resemble the parent insect, excepting that their 

 wings, and for the most part their wing-cases, are not as 

 yet fully formed, and in this second stage all insects are 

 scientifically termed pupse. 



The third stage is that of the perfect insect, in which 

 (whether male or female), or of whatever different kind, 

 as moth, butterfly, beetle, cricket, aphis, &c., it is scienti- 

 fically termed an imago. 



The term larva is from the Latin, meaning a mask or 

 ghost, and signifies that the insect in this stage gives a 

 mere vague idea of its perfect form. 



Pupa signifies an infant, and is appropriate to the 

 second stage in which the insect is forming into the 



