112 
A SERIES OF CHANGES 
to escape from the heavy and rough machine 
which it was at first, flinging aside its limbs, 
setting free its head, and—one hardly dares 
to record the fact—throwing off its body, 
and rejecting many of its principal internal 
organs! 
This little body, when it has thus escaped 
from its long heavy mask (living, nevertheless, 
but a moment since, a life full of energy), will 
dangle, and grow dry, and skilfully ascend to 
its silken fastening. There it prepares to fix 
itself in its new “Me” as a nymph, while its 
former “Me,” tossed about by the wind, is 
speedily driven I know not whither. 
All is, and ought to be, changed. The legs 
will not again be the legs. It will need 
lighter organs. What can the child of the air, 
which can balance on the point of a blade of 
grass, do with those coarse short feet, armed 
with hooks, vent-holes, and so many heavy 
implements ? 
The head will not be the head; at least, 
the enormous apparatus of mandibles will 
disappear, and also that of the muscles by 
which they were energetically moved. All is 
thrown aside with the mask. A colossal 
change! From a masticator the animal be¬ 
comes a sucker. A flexible proboscis emerges. 
If anything in the grub appeared of a 
fundamental character, it was the digestive 
apparatus. Ah, well! this basis of its being 
is no more. The absorbing throat—the power¬ 
ful stomach—the greedy entrails,—all are sup¬ 
pressed, or reduced nearly to nothing. What would they avail the 
new being which, in certain species of butterflies, dispenses with 
