SOME QUEER STICKS. 157 
they must build houses to hide in, and they begin build¬ 
ing almost as soon as they are hatched from the egg. 
There are many kinds of caddis-flies, and each kind 
builds a particular style of house. Some, in swift, clear 
water, build of grains of sand, and often their houses are 
very beautiful. Some build of pieces of rotten wood, as 
shown by Nos. 10, 12 and 37 in the illustration. Some 
build of pieces of flat grass, or the thin outer covering of 
water plants, making round, slender cases, with joints, 
quite like bamboo fishing-rods in miniature, as No. 47. 
Some build in a rude way, of grass and weeds, as in No. 
19, and some of pine or hemlock needles, like No. 25. 
Many build of sticks ; and some of these lay the sticks 
straight along their bodies, and some lay the sticks diag¬ 
onally, as in No 23. Some begin with sticks and finish 
with stones, as in the No. 12 in the middle of the photo¬ 
graph, and in No. 28 beside it. Some—and these are the 
most abundant of all in the brooks and ponds near Man¬ 
chester—build ‘ ‘ cob-houses ’ ’ of bits of twigs and stems 
of plants, laid crosswise, as shown by Nos. 3 and 5 ; and a 
few, the queerest and rarest of all, try to fool the fishes by 
fastening together entire leaves that have been blown into 
the water, as in No. 42. It is a rude and crude sort of 
shelter-, and may not afford much protection, which per¬ 
haps explains why the leaf-builders are comparatively 
rare. 
Whatever the material of which the house is built, or 
the outside form may be, the interior is always a hollow 
cylinder, which the industrious little artisan has lined with 
silk, for the caddis-flies are upholsterers as well as carpen¬ 
ters and masons. In another paper we will try to learn 
something of their ways of life, and perhaps, too, some¬ 
thing of their structure and relation to other insects. 
