Dec., 1892. 
DOMICILES. 
269 
unroll the same, he will find a largish, spiky, dusky, greenish, 
unwholesome-looking caterpillar concealed there. This is 
the larva of the Scarlet Admiral. The domicile is not tightly 
constructed, nor is it hard to find when once you know the 
sort of place to look in; but it is to the casual eye a perfect con¬ 
cealment, and a bird or other foe who wished to make a meal 
of the beast would have first to alight in the middle of the 
nettle bed, and then look up underneath the puckered leaf; a 
trick which he might have to wait some time before he 
thoroughly learned. 
Among the hawk-moths there is one family which all 
have domiciles, but they are difficult to get at, inasmuch 
as the grub feeds entirely inside the wood of a bush or 
tree. The commonest of these is the Currant Clear-wing, 
whose grub feeds on the pith of the currant-shoots ; you find 
them by looking out for dead currant-shoots in spring. Of 
course, the average gardener knows nothing of this, and so 
the Currant Clear-wing is a great deal commoner than he ought 
to be. There is another which feeds inside the poplar, and 
this spring I found a poplar on the Cherwell banks quite 
riddled with these insects ; they had evidently had a home 
there undisturbed for years, I took half a dozen of their 
cases in various stages of decay, and exhibit them along with 
two of the sloughs of the pupae ; in the latter case the moth 
lay alongside, so like a hornet that I was most unwilling to 
touch him except with the greatest precautions, even though 
I knew that the beast had no sting. 
But it is among the Bombyces and Bombycoids—those 
fat, fluffy, and various - patterned moths — described so 
delightfully in “ In Memoriam,” in a passage that I have 
never seen noticed :— 
“ And bats went round in fragrant skies, 
And wheel’d or lit the filmy shapes 
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes 
And woolly breasts and beaded eyes.” 
It is among these that the cocoons and domiciles are most 
various and interesting. Of the cocoons the neatest by far 
are the so-called Eggars, the two commonest being the Oak 
Eggar and the Small Eggar, specimens of both of which I 
exhibit. The caterpillar of the largest species is about three 
inches long, and looks almost as thick as the cocoon. It is 
really incredible how he gets inside it at all, much more how 
he can manage to spin it from the inside. It is almost as if 
a man, evolving from his interior an endless coil of leather, 
were to spin round himself a Gladstone bag two feet in 
length and thick in proportion. And it is hardly less of a 
marvel how the moth can come out of so small a place, even 
