288 INSECTA. 
the rapid escape of air from two particular cavities of the venter), 
have frequently produced considerable alarm among the people 
in certain years when it was unsually abundant *. 
The caterpillar is yellow, with blue. stripes on the side, and 
the tail recurved and zig-zag. It feeds on the Potato-vine, 
Jasmin, &c., and becomes a chrysalis near the end of August. 
The perfect Insect appears in September. 
The caterpillars of certain species, all remarkable for their 
beautiful colours—the celerio, nerit, Elpenor, porcellus—have 
the anterior extremity of the body strongly attenuated in the 
manner of a Hog’s snout, whence their French name of Co- 
chonnes, and susceptible of being retracted within the third 
ring. The sides are marked with some ocellated spots. These 
species, in this respect, form a very natural division. 
In others, as in the Sesie, the abdomen is terminated by a brush 
of scales. Scopoli formed a separate genus with them, his Macro- 
GLossuM; and Fabricius at first united them with his Sesiz. He 
afterwards—System. Glossat.—separated them, leaving that generic 
appellation to this group, and giving the name of A’curia to the 
primitive Sesiez. But the Lepidoptera he now calls Sesi#, have 
the essential characters of Sphinx; such is the stel/atarum, L.; and 
those he calls fuciformis, bombyliformis, &c. The wings of the 
two latter are mostly diaphanous f. 
Smerintuus, Lat., 
Where the antenne are serrated and there is no distinct tongue. 
The S. tiie, much more common however on the Elm, the S. 
demi-paon, S. populi, S. querct, &c., compose this subgenus. They 
are heavy Insects, and the inferior wings project beyond the superior, 
as in several of the genus Bombyx f. 
Our third division, that of the SzstapEs, comprises those in which 
the antenne are always simple, fusiform, and elongated, and fre- 
quently terminated, as in the preceding subgenera, by a little bundle 
of sete or scales; in which the inferior palpi, slender and narrow, 
have three very distinct joints, the last tapering to a point; and 
where the extremity of the posterior tibize is armed with very stout 
spines. The abdomen in most of them is terminated by a sort of 
brush. 
The caterpillars feed on the internal part of the stems or roots of 
plants, like those of the Hepiali and Cossi, are naked, without a pos- 
terior horn, and construct their cocoons in these stems with the debris 
of the substance on which they have fed. 
this character that the Atropos, and another very analogous species from Java, have 
been made to form the genus Acherontia. 
* According to M. Passerini—Ann. des Se, Nat., XIII, 332—the organ that 
produces this noise is seated in the head. 
+ For the other species, see Fabricius, loc. cit.; Godart’s Hist. Nat. des Lépid. 
de France; and a Memoir of Bois-Duval, in the Mem. de la Soc. Lin. de Paris. 
M. Lefébure de Cerisy, naval engineer, has prepared a most excellent Monograph 
of this genus, accompanied with good figures, which circumstances have not yet 
allowed him to publish. 
t See Encyc. Méthod., article Smerinthe ; and Godart, op. cit. 
