CATERPILLARS. 
CHAPTER THE FIRST. 
EGGS FROM WHICH CATERPILLARS 
ARE TO COME. 
There is an old riddle, or nursery rhyme, that 
you may perhaps remember to have guessed, and 
the answer was, an egg : 
“In marble walls as white as milk, 
Lined with a skin as soft as silk, 
Within a fountain crystal clear, 
A golden apple doth appear. 
No doors there are to this stronghold, 
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.” 
This is a description of a bird’s egg; but a moth 
or a butterfly’s egg, from which a caterpillar is to 
come, is a very different thing. 
It is, to begin with, no larger than a pin’s 
point, and when a number of these eggs are on 
a leaf, the leaf looks as if it were sprinkled with 
minute dots. But the dots are very firmly fixed, 
