LARGE CABBAGE BUTTERFLY. 183 



for the most part, on cabbages, and some other of our 

 culinary plants, which renders them more injurious to 

 the kitchen garden than any other. We have seen a 

 garden, with many hundreds of cabbages completely 

 devoured by these caterpillars. They are of the 

 number of those known in England by the trivial 

 name of grub, and in the perfect or winged state, they 

 are distinguished by the less ambiguous epithet of 

 Large Cabbage Butterfly. 



From the astonishing fecundity of these insects, it 

 may be wondered that they do not, in the course of 

 time, completely overspread the face of the earth, and 

 totally consume every green plant. This would 

 certainly be the case, if the Omnipotent had not put 

 a check to their progress. There is a genus of little 

 insects, called by naturalists the Ichneumon, which 

 always oviposits within the body of other insects, or 

 their larva or pupa?. Different species have assigned 

 to them particular insects, and the parent Ichneumon 

 will lay her eggs no where else ; she searches for 

 these caterpillars with unremitting assiduity, till she 

 is successful. In these caterpillars the eggs are 

 deposited, and are hatched ; there they continue 

 during their larva state, preying upon the vitals of 

 the animal ; they pass to the pupa condition, and 

 eventually emerge the perfect insects. Some idea 

 may be formed of the service rendered to mankind by 

 these Ichneumons which prey upon noxious larva, 

 from the fact, that out of thirty individuals of the 

 common Cabbage Caterpillar which Reaumur put 

 into a glass to feed, twenty-five were fatally pierced by 



