140 
THE YOUNG SCIENTIST. 
hours' time was something astonishing. 
Eating so much and growing so fast, they 
had to moult or cast their skins every 
few days. And so I kept on feeding and 
Fig. 2.— COCOON OF ATTACUS CECEOPIA. 
feeding these voracious creatures, till they 
had attained one inch in length, when one 
day I determined to transfer them to the 
elders growing along the stone walls of 
Johnson's woods, and let Mother Nature 
take care of them for the rest of their 
lives. This was a long and tedious per- 
formance, for the doctor had strongly 
cautioned me never to touch the young 
caterpillars with my fingers, but always 
to brusli them with a goose feather on to 
a piece of clean paper or into a clean 
saucer. 
Anxiously I watched them all summer 
long, as they grew so round and plump 
and green, with the strange little orange- 
colored knobs that grew from their backs 
and sides, and from which sharp and 
short black spines projected in every di- 
rection. At last the fall came, and they 
began to become uneasy, and ceased to 
take any more food. Then they began 
solemnly and slowly to pass down the 
Fig. 3.— EGGS OF ATTACUS CKCROPIA ATTACHED TO 
LEAF. 
tall slender canes of the elders to within 
a foot or less of the ground, where they 
began spinning their cocoons, much after 
the fashion shown in the accompanying 
figure 1, and in two weeks' time all the 
caterpillars had completed this operation 
and passed into tbeir long winter's sleep, 
encased as shown in Fig. 2. 
How many cocoons of the Attacus cecro- 
pia I gathered that fall I cannot remem- 
ber, but I do know that my room was 
festooned and draped with them on yards 
and yards of thread, to which I had 
attached them, and that in course of time 
by exchanges I got together not a large 
but a very satisfactory collection of in- 
sects. 
