Queen of American Silk-Spinners. 125 
necessary leaves for a basis cannot be obtained, as occurs in 
captivity, the inconvenience is overcome, but not without 
difficulty. Leaves, you must know, are in Luna’s way of 
thinking, as essential to cocoon-building as wooden or iron 
beams and girders to man’s own constructing. Without a 
framework of some sort, what a sorry attempt would we 
make at home-building, but Luna does succeed, after a good 
deal of wise planning and no little worry, in producing a 
house which is well worthy her effort. 
While the gaudy moth or butterfly, when contrasted in 
wisdom and sense with the dingy-colored bee, may suffer in 
comparison, yet she is by no means the dull, stupid creature 
she is pictured to be. She lives, it is a fact, as has often been 
said, for the increase of her race, but the interest she shows 
for the young she may never see, in laying her eggs upon the 
plant that is to serve them as food and home, puts her upon 
a rather high plane of intelligent existence. Luna’s life, in 
the perfect state, is usually quite brief. It is one of the 
happiest of honeymoons. Love conquers and destroys all 
other passions of her being, while her gormandizing off- 
spring are never troubled by the ardent flame which consumes 
even the thought of sipping the nectar of the flowers that 
rival in beauty the wings of the mother, who is the per- 
fect representation and embodiment of elegance and grace. 
While the early insect lives and eats, the adult form, upon 
whom Dame Nature has expended so much wealth of color 
and such symmetry of shape, which make her a “thing of 
beauty and a joy forever,” lives and dies, for in her seeming 
haste and forgetfulness the great mother of us all has made 
her without the essential means of tasting food, a delight 
and an enjoyment which the lords of creation are so wont 
to esteem the purpose and aim of all human existence. 
