ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



69 



myself with the thought that a living thing should grow ; and in after years when I 

 learned that an object in water appeared thicker than when out of it, I wondered if I 

 had not been deceived in that way, but there was an apparent roughness of their surface 

 which I could not account for, as I knew that hairs did not soften and swell in water ; 

 but what I had read explained most satisfactorily everything I had seen in connection 

 with them. 



If that tuft of hairs had been wholly in the water, and their full length endowed 

 with motion as part of it was, each hair would have been moving independently of the 

 others, and would likely have been scattered all over the pool ; then in all probability 

 my attention would not have been particularly attracted by them, further than to think 

 that " Hair Snakes " were unusually numerous in that pool ; and so I would have missed 

 an instructive lesson, tor what I read would not have impressed me as it did, but for 

 what I had seen previously. This is an experiment that anyone favourably situated for 

 obtaining the right conditions could easily carry out for themselves, and then they would 

 have ocular proof of what a reasonable excuse there does exist for the belief that " hairs 

 do turn into snakes." 



Fig. 38. 



When engaged at one time in an effort to bring some chrysalids of the Tomato 

 Sphinx (Fig. 38) to maturity, and obtain the moths, I noticed that one of them was dead, 

 so laid it aside for a time. Upon my next handling it I found the outer skin dry 

 and shrivelled, and upon removing a portion of it, which was an exceedingly thin 

 and brittle scale, I saw that the moth within had been fully matured up to the point 

 of emerging before it died, so finding that I had an excellent subject upon which to 

 operate for discovering the position and arrangement of the various parts of the insect, 

 as they were disposed of in the chrysalid prior to its assuming an active life, I com- 

 menced investigating. Carefully removing the outer covering, which came away as 

 freely and as clean as if it had never been in any way attached to the corpse within, 

 but upon which had been distinctly impressed every external feature of the coming 

 moth, the matured pupa was disclosed scaled and coloured complete. The winglets, 

 which were about three-quarters of an inch in length, pressed firmly — in what seems to 

 be an unnatural position — on its breast, instead of on the sides where they are 



