138 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
name. “Its food plant in the North has not yet been discovered,” 
says a prominent entomologist. Look to your hollyhocks, altheas, 
and mallows, my scientific friend, for here you will certainly find 
the recluse in congenial company. Here is the little“ gourd” ex- 
pert, a tiny moth that shows no evidence of inherited dyspepsia, 
though its broods devour indiscriminately the leaves and green 
fruit of cucumber, watermelon, gourd, muskmelon, pumpkin, squash, 
and wild star-cucumbers, all of the Melon family. The imported 
silk-worm, it is said, will starve on most substitutes offered in 
place of its native food, the mulberry, but is found to thrive on 
the Osage orange—why? For the same intuitive reason that 
many species of butterflies which feed exclusively on grasses rec- 
ognize a grass in the sugar-cane and Indian-corn. 
We have noted various specialists in quite a list of botanical 
orders. This buzzing humming-bird-like moth which now whirls 
about our evening lamps is a reminder of another instructive 
instance of botanical skill. It is a Hawk-moth, or Sphinx, a name 
applied by Linnzeus to a class of moths noted for the strange 
arch attitude of their caterpillars; but the name is further borne 
out in their attributes of wisdom. Of these, one group has been 
named by Harris, Phzdampelus—‘“I1 love the vine.” “I love the 
Vitis,’ or its classic equivalent, would have been nearer the mark, 
for all this tribe of sphinxes, of which I recall five familiar ex- 
amples, are equally fond of the grape and the Virginia-creeper, or 
“five-leaved ivy,” as it is sometimes called. On these two plants 
only are the insects found. What shall we infer from this cir- 
cumstance? That these plants are the only two native genera 
in the order V’z¢ace@—an inference which we find is sustained in 
our botany. acs 
Not many years since, however, a prominent florist imported 
a new and beautiful exotic vine—a native of Japan, a luxuriant, 
close-clinging, rapid climber—which met with great popular favor, 
and which now completely embowers many of our metropolitan 
churches, and even private dwellings, clambering from basement 
to cornice during a period of three or four years. In appearance 
it is as much like an ivy as anything else—indeed, quite ivy-like 
