The Moths and Butterflies 



43 



from injury by the moth, so he kills his thousands of pupae by dropping 

 the cocoons into boiling water or by putting them into a hot oven. Then, 

 after cleaning away the loose fluffy silk of the outside, he finds the beginning 

 of the long thread which makes the cocoon, and with a clever little reeling- 

 machine he unwinds, unbroken, its hundreds of feet of merchantable silk floss. 

 From here to the silk-dress stage is a story not entomological, but one of 

 elaborate machines and processes of human devising. 



Hovering, humming-bird-like, in the early dusk over the deep flower- 

 cup of a petunia or honeysuckle or great jimson-weed, with its long flexible 

 proboscis thrust deep down to the nectaries, and the swift wings making a 



FIG. 619. Larva of the achemon sphinx-moth, Philampelus achemon. 

 (After Lugger; natural size.) 



faint haze on either side of the trim body, the sphinx-moth, or hawk-moth, 

 or humming-bird moth, as variously called, is a familiar garden acquaintance. 

 But that he is but one of a hundred different American species; that he has 

 cousins red and cousins green, somber cousins and harlequin cousins; that, 

 strong- winged, clean-bodied, exquisitely painted, and honey-fine in his taste 

 as he is now, his earliest youth was passed as a "disgusting," soft, fat, green 

 tomato-worm or tobacco-worm or grape-vine dresser, and that at a later 

 adolescent period he lay buried in the ground, cased, mummy-like, in a dark- 

 brown sarcophagus all this may not be as familiar. Still, excepting the 

 giant silkworm-moths, the Saturnians, no other moth group is so much 

 affected by collectors and crawlery proprietors as the Sphingidae. Thus 

 the various adolescent stages of several hawk-moth species are known to 



