354 Insect Architecture. 



ignorant, who are so prone to become the victims of ground- 

 less fears, should have taken serious ' alarm on having so 

 unusual a phenomenon forced upon their attention. Some 

 alarmists accordingly asserted that the caterpillars "were 

 the usual presage of the plague ;" and others that they not 

 only presaged it, but would actually cause it, for " their 

 numbers were great enough to render the air pestilential ;" 

 while, to add to the mischief, "they would destroy every 

 kind of vegetation, and starve the cattle in the fields." 

 " Almost every one," adds Curtis, " ignorant of their history, 

 was under the greatest apprehensions concerning them ; so 

 that even prayers were oflfered up in some churches to 

 deliver the country from the apprehended approaching 

 calamity." 



It seems to have been either the same caterpillar, or one 

 very nearly allied to it, probably that of the golden-tail 

 (Porthesia chrysorrJicea), which in 1731-2 produced a similar 

 alarm in France. Eeaumur, on going from Paris to Tours, 

 in September, 1730, found every oak, great and small, 

 literally swarming with them, and their leaves parched and 

 brown as if some burning wind had passed over them ; for 

 when newly hatched, like the young buff-tips, they only eat 

 one of the membranes of the leaf, and of course the other 

 withers away. These infant legions, under the shelter of 

 their warm nests, survived the winter in such numbers, that 

 they threatened the destruction not only of the fruit-trees, 

 but of the forests, every tree, as Eeaumur says, being over- 

 run with them. The Parliament of Paris thought that 

 ravages so widely extended loudly called for their inter- 

 ference, and they accordingly issued an edict, to compel 

 the people to uncaterpillar (decJieniller) the trees; which 

 Eeaumur ridiculed as impracticable, at least in the forests. 

 About the middle of May, however, a succession of cold 

 rains produced so much mortality among the caterpillars, 

 that the people were happily released from the edict ; for it 

 soon became difficult to find a single individual of the 

 species.* In the same way the cold rains, during the 

 * Reaumur, ii. p. 137. 



