ARGYNNIS VII. 
anxiety. I arranged a keg with a gauze bag high over the top, which was con¬ 
fined by the upper hoop of the keg, and planted fresh violets, which had to be 
renewed almost daily, covering the earth partially with stones, and setting sticks 
which might serve as resting places for the larvae. This appeared to answer the 
purpose well. The larvae were fond of resting on the sticks, head downward, or 
upon the sides of the bag, coming down to feed when impelled by hunger. After 
remaining motionless for hours, they would suddenly arouse and start off in 
extreme haste, running all about the inclosure, and on reaching the leaves would 
feed ravenously, and then return to their resting place. Not unfrequently they 
were extended on the stones or the damp earth as if for coolness, the weather 
at this time having become warm. 
It is uncertain whether the larvae of butterflies see distinctly, or at all, al¬ 
though they are furnished with what are called ocelli, there being five of these 
organs on either side of the head. On one occasion I happened to be at hand 
when an Aphrodite suddenly started down the side of the bag, to disappear below, 
and presently emerge on one of the upright sticks. This it ran over and about, 
and from a point on the side of it towards the plant made great efforts to reach 
one of the stems, which was at something more than an inch distant from the 
stick. Several times the caterpillar stretched itself out till it was nearly twice 
its natural length, holding to the stick by its anal and last pair of ventral clasp- 
ers, and moving its head and body from side to side to feel for the plant. But 
the attempts were in vain. Then it remounted the stick, and reached out in 
a similar manner from the top in directions where were no leaves, till at last 
it turned right again, and by an effort more violent than usual, seized a stem by 
its jaws and first pair of legs, and holding by them, dropped its body from the 
stick and climbed to the leaf. There was evidently a sense of direction in the 
first instance, from the descent of the bag to the reaching the stick, though not 
of sight, as the stick was fixed at the base of the plant, and the latter was as 
easily reached as the former. And when on the stick, there was a sense that the 
leaves were near, without a certainty of the precise locality. 
Only three Cybele reached chrysalis and one Aphrodite. They spun buttons of 
white silk and hung suspended, nearly straight, the anterior segments but little 
bent, and so continued for about two days and nights in the case of Cybele, 
thirty-six hours in Aphrodite. This last died in chrysalis; the others yielded the 
imago in twenty-two to twenty-four days. The Diana suspended in a similar 
manner last of all, on seventeenth of May, and the change to chrysalis occurred 
on the nineteenth, the interval having been fifty-four hours. It was so pro¬ 
longed that I feared lest the larva had not vitality sufficient to enable it to 
change, and when on rising in the middle of the last night to see what the fate 
