STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
837 
tOCtJST. LEAVES* 
■white, the four following ones light green, the next, or eighth of the series, 
light yellow, the ninth and tenth pale brownish green, the eleventh black¬ 
ish, and the last semi-transparent and like colorless glass—as though it 
were designed to imitate a string of beads of different colors. Its length 
when full grown is 0.18. The convex upper side of its cell forms a kind 
of fold or plait, in which the worm spins its cocoon, which is snow-white 
and more closely woven than that of the preceding species, and the pupa 
enclosed therein is of a darker or dusky color. A portion of these pupae 
probably remain unhatched during the winter, lying in their burrows in 
the dead fallen leaves. Others give out the moths in autumn, and as cold 
weather comes on these delicate tiny creatures creep into the crevices 
under the loose scales of bark upon the trunks of trees, and similar situa¬ 
tions, where they remain in a torpid state through the winter, and if so 
fortunate as to escape the notice of the spiders which hide themselves in 
the same places, they come abroad again upon the wing the following 
spring. 
The genus Argyromeges of Mr. Curtis, to which this and two species 
on oaks described in the preceding pages pertain, comprises quite a number 
of very minute moths, as will be inferred from their larvae occupying such 
a narrow space as half the thickness of leaves so thin as those of the 
locust. But what they lack in size is in many of the species compensated 
in the brilliancy of their colors and the prettincss of their adornment. 
Men have often exerted themselves to write the Lord’s prayer or the 
decalogue within the compass of a sixpence, and it would seem that in 
these minutest kinds of moths as in many other insects Nature had aimed 
to show how much splendor and elegance she could include within the 
smallest limits. In this genus the fore wings are frequently of the most 
brilliant golden and silvery hues and marked with oblique streaks. They 
are narrow and rolled around the body when at rest. The hind wings are 
very narrow and fringed on both sides with long fine hairs. Their heads 
have a rough uncombed appearance from a tuft of dense erect and radiating 
bristles placed upon the crown. 
Tliis species is allied to Klcmannella and other similar European moths of this genus in its 
oolois and marks. Its fore wings are of a uniform brilliant golden color, with four silvery 
white triangular spots or hands ou their outer half, which are bordered with black and are 
placed at nearly equal distances from each other, the anterior two being larger and placed 
obliquely and the others transverse. On the innor half of these wings are also three or four 
similar bands, the two last ones with their inner ends running into the onds of the two hind 
ones of the outer sido. On their tips is a large black dot with a broad whitish border on its 
hind side, followed by a curved black band on the hind edge of the wing, boyond which 
comes the fringe which is of a smoky gray color. Often a longitudinal black indentation or 
short stripo occurs on the middle of these wings forward of the black dot and between the 
inner ends of the second and third bands. The hind wings are blackish with a smoky gray 
fringe. The legs are alternately banded with white and black. 
I lmvc sometimes met with numbers of these moths in their winter 
quarters beneath the large loose scales of bark on hickory trees, and at 
such a distance from any locust trees as to render it probable they had 
