LACKEY-MOTH. GHOST MOTH. 273 



Wiltshire, these caterpillars are reputed to do extensive dam- 

 age ; and in Germany, wo to the lovers of sour-krout ! when 

 this lover of cabbages has visited the potagere before them. 

 There, whole basketfuls of caterpillars are said, in innocent 

 and ignorant simplicity, to be buried alive, only to rise, living, 

 from the earth ; for, as observed by Roesel, a native naturalist, 

 one might as well expect to kill a crab by covering it with sea- 

 water, as thus to destroy a caterpillar, which always burrows 

 under ground to change into a chrysalis. 



Among the destructives of orchard and kitchen-garden, there 

 is a race of very common brown Moths, yclept the Lackeys, so 

 called from the gaudy colouring of their caterpillars, varie- 

 gated with stripes of blue, black, white, and scarlet.* These, 

 which are among the social feeders, are in some seasons most 

 egregious social pests, helping themselves, something after the 

 manner of the class they are named from, to extravagant 

 board, in return for making a destructive show. 



The hop-vine and the burdock are sometimes seen to droop 

 their leaves and stalks without any apparent cause. The 

 rational might suppose them fainting under the influence of 

 summer heat ; the ignorant imagine them struck by what they 

 call a blight ; the fanciful would have declared, in days of 

 greater superstition, that they had been exposed to some " evil 

 eye" of ghost, or witch, or goblin; and, as it happens, a ghost is 

 really at the bottom of the mystery, for a Ghost Motli\ in its 



* Glisiocampa Newtria. t Hepwlus humuli. 



YOL. L 17. 



