INSTINCT OF INSECTS. 479 
of no very simple kind. Complicated, however, as these 
manoceuvres seem, our ingenious workman is not confined 
to them. By way of putting its resources to the test, 
Reaumur cut off the serrated edge from the nearly-finished 
coat of one of them, and exposed the little occupant to 
the day. He expected that it would have quitted its 
mutilated garment and commenced another; and so it 
certainly would, had it been guided by an invariable in- 
stinct. But he calculated erroneously. Like one of its 
brother tailors of the biped race, it knew how “to cut its 
coat according to its cloth,’ and immediately setting 
about repairing the injury sewed up the rent. Nor was 
this all. The scissars having cut off one of the projections 
intended to enter into the construction of the triangular 
end of its case, it entirely changed the original plan, and 
made that end the head which had been first designed 
for the tail. 
On another occasion Reaumur observed one of these 
larvee to ‘cut out its coat from the very centre of a leaf, 
where it is obvious a series of operations wholly different 
must be adopted, the two membranes composing it ne- 
cessarily requiring to be cut and sewed on two sides in- 
stead of on one only. But what was most striking m 
this new procedure was the alteration which the caterpil- 
lar made in the period of sewing up its garment. When 
these larvee cut out their case from the edge of a leaf, 
they seem aware that, if they were to detach it entirely 
from the inner side before the process of sewing, lining, 
&c., is completed, having no support on the exterior edge, 
it would be liable to fall down; at the same time they 
could not sew together the membranes composing it at 
the inner side, without cutting them in part from the leaf. 
