312 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [15:7— Oct., 1919 



However, Mr. Polyphemus preserved his dignity and won out in 

 the end, turning around and walking off with a haughty air. 



Consider, for instance, the sphinx caterpillar feeding smugly 

 on the Virginia creeper, climbing over your pizaza! The floor 

 shows unmistakable signs that a sphinx has domiciled himself on 

 your vine, and yet you may hunt for it by the hour and never 

 discover it except by chance; then you find it such a remarkable 

 looking creature that you cannot understand how you saw any- 

 thing but it when you were searching for it. The reason for all 

 this camouflage is simply an arrangement to protect the caterpillar 

 from interruptions in its great business of eating, and resting to 

 digest what it has eaten. 



Moreover, it was probably a caterpillar that gave Ariadne the 

 idea of providing Thesus with a thread to guide him out of the 

 labyrinth, for it is a caterpillar habit to spin a thread as it goes, 

 and thus it is able to follow its own multiple footsteps back to 

 where it started, if it chooses; in the case of the tent caterpillars, 

 they leave their webs during the day and good weather to feed on 

 leaves, on far distant branches, but they retrace their way by 

 following the siken threads laid down on the way out, and thus 

 find the home tent at night. 



Perhaps of all caterpillar wisdom, foresight is the most remark- 

 able. When one has eaten and grown until it feels its appetite 

 failing, it suddenly turns hermit and starts off in quest of some 

 proper place to establish a hermitage ; finding this, it begins with 

 great skill and industry to weave around iseslf a cocoon of silk, 

 always cunningly concealed by its color, and often having leaves 

 or other material woven in to make the concealment more perfect ; 

 the outside of the cocoon is coarsely woven, but the inside next 

 to its precious body is soft and of fine weft. Filled with prescience 

 that it may sometime cease to be a hermit, it may build one end 

 of the cocoon more loosely or in valve form to permit of easy exit. 

 This accomplished, it changes from a caterpillar to an oblong 

 object, smooth and brown and proceeds to the business of an inner 

 revoluton which, like other revolutions, consists of tearing down 

 all existing conditions in a true Bolshevik manner; later, the work 

 of reconstruction begins on a more complex and noble plan that 

 finally finds expression in wings and glorious powers of flight. 



Now there comes a change in the philosophy of our insect. 

 What was the chief business formerly, eating, is no longer a matter 



