The Moths and Butterflies 
43 1 
from injury by the moth, so he kills his thousands of pupae by dropping 
the cocoons into boiling water or by putting them into a hot oven. Then, 
after cleaning away the loose fluffy silk of the outside, he finds the beginning 
of the long thread which makes the cocoon, and with a clever little reeling- 
machine he unwinds, unbroken, its hundreds of feet of merchantable silk floss. 
From here to the silk-dress stage is a story not entomological, but one of 
elaborate machines and processes of human devising. 
Hovering, humming-bird-like, in the early dusk over the deep flower- 
cup of a petunia or honeysuckle or great jimson-weed, with its long flexible 
proboscis thrust deep down to the nectaries, and the swift wings making a 
Fig. 619. —Larva of the achemon sphinx-moth, Philampelus achemon. 
(After Lugger; natural size.) 
faint haze on either side of the trim body, the sphinx-moth, or hawk-moth, 
or humming-bird moth, as variously called, is a familiar garden acquaintance. 
But that he is but one of a hundred different American species; that he has 
cousins red and cousins green, somber cousins and harlequin cousins; that, 
strong-winged, clean-bodied, exquisitely painted, and honey-fine in his taste 
as he is now, his earliest youth was passed as a “disgusting,” soft, fat, green 
tomato-worm or tobacco-worm or grape-vine dresser, and that at a later 
adolescent period he lay buried in the ground, cased, mummy-like, in a dark- 
brown sarcophagus—all this may not be as familiar. Still, excepting the 
giant silkworm-moths, the Saturnians, no other moth group is so much 
affected by collectors and crawlery proprietors as the Sphingidae. Thus 
the various adolescent stages of several hawk-moth species are known to 
