STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
803 
IfIDGE. COCOONS. DESCRIBED. 
chanced to be emptied out the door upon a blustering winter’s 
day or at a time when the surface of the fields were crusted with 
ice from falling rain and sleet, a portion of them might readily 
be driven by the winds or carried in drifting snows to this dis¬ 
tance from the barn. I therefore suspect the larvae which I found 
were not larvae which had come before harvest from out the 
wheat growing there, but that they had been conveyed into the 
barn, from whence they were casually returned to this spot after 
cold weather had suspended their operations for the season. 
And this well illustrates how facts themselves may be false and 
may thus lead us unsuspectingly into errors. 
The cocoons resemble little round grains smaller than a mus¬ 
tard or a turnip seed. They are usually a very little longer than 
broad and measure about 0.05 in length, though sometimes no 
more than 0.03. When their surface is clean of dirt they are of 
a dull pale yellow color when moist, and gray when dry. They 
are so dense and opake that the bright yellow worm within can¬ 
not be discerned through their walls. When dried they are 
brittle, breaking like the shell of an egg in small irregular frag¬ 
ments. Yet they are evidently formed of exceedingly fine threads 
which the worm spins; for when two cocoons are found lying 
close together it is common for them to be united,by loose fibres 
on the surface of the one woven into the surface of the other. 
Most of them also have particles of dirt so woven into their sur¬ 
face that it is difficult to wash them clean. This tenacious coat¬ 
ing of dirt and their exceedingly small size will render it almost 
impossible to discover these cocoons, even with the aid of a mag¬ 
nifying glass, where they lie in their natural situation in the 
ground of old wheat fields. Even when numerous!) 7 crowded 
into a small quantity of earth in a vial, it is only by washing 
this earth in a saucer of water with a camel’s hair pencil that I 
readily detect them. 
Several of these cocoons thus obtained happened to be inclosed 
in a vial over night. Next morning one of the larvae was found 
to have forsaken its cocoon and was slowly crawling around in 
the vial, differing in no respect then, that I perceived, from the 
larvae as they appear when they are entering the ground. To 
come out, it had crowded off one end of the cocoon in the form 
of a little hemispherical cup or lid, with its edge smoothly cut, 
a number of fibres on one side being unsevered and serving as a 
