34 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 



only their long bodies visible in the fuzzy, buzzy halos of wings, 

 the slender capillary tongues uncoiled, nearly six inches in length, 

 and thrust in turn deep into the honeyed tubes. 



The honeysuckle bush was a favorite twilight haunt in those 

 memorable early years of my entomological fervor. One single 

 evening I remember bringing to my net over thirty specimens, 

 great and small. What a strange fascination they always had 

 for me, with their great bulging eyes, their grotesque shape, their 

 mysterious flight, and queer exotic look generally as unlike the 

 creatures of the sunshine as though from the Stygian world. 

 Indeed, my first specimen could not have amazed me more had 

 I bagged a chimera fresh from the moon, for these sphinx-moths 

 are hid from the sharpest eyes by day; proteges of gray rocks 

 and fences, or merged in the fissured bark of trees, eluding the 

 most careful search, their frequent glowing color now smoulder- 

 ing beneath the ashes of their upper wings, from which they rise 

 like a phoenix in the dusk. These moths are mostly dressed in 

 sombre colors, but some of them bear the aureate hues of the 

 sunset on their wings, others are black as night, or painted with 

 olives dark as the midnight trees, and one there is lit with the 

 rosy tints of dawn, as though thus to typify in their motley the 

 sombre interval of their animated being. Who that has wit- 

 nessed this revelation among the honeysuckles could be any 

 longer insensible to the vital interdependence between this blos- 

 som and the moth ? 



Most of the nocturnal flowers have thus adapted themselves 

 especially to these long-tongued Lepidoptera, hiding their honey 

 in such deep tubes or spurs that it is only accessible to the 

 hawk-moths. To these, then, is intrusted the perpetuity of many 

 night-flowering plants. 



In attributing a phosphorescent quality to the evening prim- 

 rose I have mainly followed the license of fancy, although, if the 

 scientists are to be believed, I have indeed scarcely wandered 

 from the literal truth. For the singular luminous glow of this 

 and other nocturnal flowers has long attracted the attention of 

 the curious, and positive qualities of inherent light have been 



