SECTION III. — PUP^. 



XI. 



Mechanism of suspending ChrysaLdes. 



A SAILOR wojld find it no easy process to cut for 

 himself a suit of clothes out of a set sail, holding, the 

 while, only by the portion that he was cutting 

 This is an operation which is performed every day by 

 the tent-making caterpillars.* Ditficult, however, 

 as this may be considered to be, it appears as nothing 

 when compared with another problem performed by 

 a different famiy of caterpillars. ' Country fellows, 

 for a prize,' says Kirby, ' sometimes amuse the 

 assembled inhabitants of a village by running races 

 in sacks: take one of the most active and adroit of 

 these, bind him hand and loot, suspend him by the 

 bottom of his sadi, head downwards, to the branch 

 of a lofty tree; make an opening in one side of the 

 sack, and set him to extricate himself from it, to de- 

 tach it from its lx)ld, and suspend himself by his feet 

 in its place. Tliough endowed with the suppleness 

 of an Indian juggler, and promised his sack full of 

 gold for a reward, you would set him an absolute 

 impossibility; yet this is what our caterpillars, in- 

 structed by a beneficent Creator, easily perform. '| 

 The manner in which this is efiected we shall now 

 describe. 



A caterpillar, when about to change into a chry 



* See Insect Architecture, p. 223. t Intr. iii, 209 



