57 
The strange processions begin perhaps when the larvae are quite small, 
and possibly under special circumstances immediately after they emerge 
from the egg. The observations conducted in the Hartz in the summer 
of 1868 have shown that the tendency to the formation of processions is 
inherent in the larvae from their very birth ; for on the 22nd May of that year 
some grubs were found which were only half a line in length, yet on being 
placed on some moist dead beech leaves they immediately began to march 
like adult larvae. The processions themselves have in Germany been 
noticed only between the last days of June and the middle of August ; this 
as a rule is the time of the transformation from larvae to pupae or 
chrysalids, which usually takes place beneath the layer of dead leaves in 
the runs of mice or other hollows. The pupae lie together in long heaps, 
without any real silky web, and are only quite loosely united together by 
single fine threads, cobweb-like, and the shrivelled brown, shining, exuviae 
which remain attached to the end of the pupae. The pupae are 1|-2J lines 
in length, at first milk-white, afterwards brownish-yellow and finally from 
the head to the end of the wiry sheaths blackish in colour. The pupa of 
the female has a row of orange -coloured spots along the middle line of the 
abdomen, and another along the back. The insect remains only 8, 10 or 12 
days in the chrysalis state, and the perfect insect, which is scarcely more 
than 2 inches long, is one of the midges ("Trauermucke" or the mourning- 
midge of the Germans) a dipterous insect, sluggish in its habits, more 
addicted to crawling than flying about. Its vital energies are entirely 
directed towards the maintainence of its kind, and in the forest the midge 
often does not at all issue forth from under the leaves, its birth-place ; but 
j in the same place, where she cast off her pupa-case, she lays her eggs and dies 
either there and then or soon after, having lived at the most 3 days. Each 
female lays about 100 eggs, which form a little round heap; they are very 
small, 15 or 20 together only forming a mass the size of a poppy-seed 
ellipsoidal in form, transparent, shining, at first milky -white, but assuming 
after the first 6 or 12 hours a brown colour. They pass the winter under 
the leafy carpet of the forest. The larvae escaping from the eggs, perhaps 
as a rule in the month of May, form as it were separate fa mili es or 
societies, and again have their processions, according as circumstances 
enforce or permit. In what number and to what extent these Host-Worm 
processions, and the number of larvae composing them, do occur, the 
following cases will illustrate; on the 24th July, 1864, a Host- Worm glided 
in the Leine Forest near Altenbury, Saxony, as late as six o'clock in the 
morning in a straight line from S. to N. ; it was 52 feet long, and of an 
