304 HAWK-MOTHS AND SPHINXES. 



the moth's hovering mode of flight, the latter, on the cater- 

 pillar's remarkable form and position when at rest. This is 

 a beautiful and interesting tribe of insects, associated with 

 summer dawns and summer twilights opening and closing 

 flowers morning and evening stars and all that is calm and 

 subdued, opposed to the glare and gloom of nature. 



When the gaudy butterfly has folded her wings for sleep, 

 and while the dark night-flying moth is still lurking under 

 leafy covert, various sphinxes may be seen darting rapidly from 

 flower to flower, or busied in rifling their sweets as they hang 

 suspended over their honeyed cups, like the bird of rapine 



" that, poised in air, 

 Flaps his broad wing, but moves not." 



These insect tipplers imbibe their deep potations by unrolling 

 their usually coiled tongues, which are hollow tubes, often of 

 prodigious length, and plunging them to the bottom of the 

 nectaries they drain. 



Many of the hawk-moths are named after the trees and 

 plants which furnish the favourite food of their caterpillar 

 life ; and from among these we shall select, as greatly distin- 

 guished for size and beauty, the " Convolvulus "* and the 

 " Privet." The former, called also the " Bind-weed " and the 

 " Unicorn" hawk-moth, is a splendid specimen of its kind, if 

 the term " splendid "so often ridiculously mis-applied may 

 be aptly employed with reference to its wide expanse of wing 



* Sphinx convolvuli. (Frontispiece.) 



