74 STATES OF INSECTS. 



her own body or from some other substance. Most 

 commonly, indeed, the female leaves her cluster of eggs 

 without any other covering than the varnish with which 

 in this case they are usually besmeared. Either they are 

 deposited in summer and will soon be hatched, or they 

 are of a substance calculated to encounter and resist the 

 severities of the season. But many species, whose eggs 

 are more tender or have, to resist the cold and wet of 

 winter, defend them in the most ingenious manner with 

 a clothing of different kinds of substance. 



Cassida viridis, a tortoise beetle, Rosel tells us, covers 

 her group of eggs with a partially transparent membrane. 

 Arctia Salicis F., a moth, common on willows, wholly 

 conceals hers with a white frothy substance, which when 

 dry is partly friable and partly cottony, and being insoluble 

 in water effectually protects them from the weather 3 . The 

 female of Lophyrus Pint (a saw-fly), having by means 

 of her double saw made a suitable longitudinal incision 

 in the leaf of a fir, and placed in it her eggs in a single 

 row end to end, stops it up with a green frothy fluid 

 mixed with the small pieces of leaf detached by her saws, 

 which when dry becomes friable : a necessary precaution, 

 since these eggs are extremely brittle b . Arctia cliry- 

 sorhcea, Hypogymna dispar, and several other moths, sur- 

 round theirs with an equally impervious and more singular 

 clothing — hair stripped from their own bodies. With 

 this material, which they pluck by means of their pincer- 

 like ovipositor, they first form a soft couch on the sur- 

 face of some leaf: they then place upon it successively 

 layers of eggs, and surround them with a similar downy 

 coating, and when the whole number is deposited cover 

 a De G eer i. 192. b j bitL ii# 982> 



