28 AGLOSSA PINGUINALIS. 



suffer injury. One knows that the ordinary larvae are 

 suffocated as soon as one stops their spiracles with 

 oil or some other greasy matter ; but M. Rolander 

 has remarked that the larvae are able to hide their 

 spiracles in folds of the skin to avoid their being 

 wetted and stopped by the greasy materials which 

 surround them." 



" He does not say that he has seen them reside in 

 coverings in form of fixed tubes ; he appears not to 

 have known that M. de Reaumur had before spoken 

 of these larvae under the name of ' fausses teignes 

 des cuirs,' because they inhabit a fixed sheath, for he 

 said they had not been described by any author.' ' 



Now, after my recent experience, the foregoing 

 extracts afford me most convincing evidence that 

 Rolander was not really acquainted with the larva 

 until it had ceased feeding, and 1 think I shall 

 presently prove this ; and I can only suppose that he 

 must have somehow deceived himself in imagining 

 that which he asserted of its food, and of its spiracles, 

 ingeniously suiting the one to the other; but it seems 

 something more strange that for more than a hundred 

 years all authors who have written on the Pyralides 

 have gone on copying the above, and commenting on 

 it as one of the stock facts in this branch of natural 

 history. 



To return to the record of my experience with the 

 eggs sent me by Mr. Fletcher, when I received them 

 on the 11th of August they were only just in time, as 

 two of them hatched in the evening of that day, and 

 five more the next day. I put the larvae at first on a 

 little of the barn sweepings in a glass-topped box, in 

 order to observe, if they fed at all, what they would 

 choose, for these sweepings consisted of a variety of 

 things, such as husks of wheat and of oats, small 

 fragments of straw, and of Cladium thatch, also of 

 the pods of beans, small seeds of various plants, short 

 bits of grass and other dried stems, some woolly dust, 

 and a few empty pupa-skins in cases of some small 



