148 
THE MOTH. 
of a snowy-white, with a silky gloss upon them. 
But the many-plumed moth, that comes creeping- 
on the inside of the window pane, towards the 
end of autumn, is more beautiful still. Her 
wings are divided into as many as a dozen of 
these feathery strips, and are of a silver-grey, 
with a black spot upon each tip. 
You have heard of the butterfly, whose 
wings seem to change color while you are 
looking at them; and some moths have the same 
peculiarity. 
There is one foreign moth* that has patches of 
green upon the wings, but when you look at 
them in a different light, they appear to be blue; 
and so are like the chameleon, about which the 
countryman quarrelled. A naturalist once em¬ 
ployed some persons to make drawings of this 
insect. One painted the wings green, and the 
other painted them blue, and each obstinately 
maintained he was right. And so he was, for 
they had looked green to him, and blue to his 
neighbour; and in fact, both were right, and both 
were wrong. 
Each species of moth has its own particular 
mode of flying; and this, no doubt, depends upon 
the size and structure of the wings. 
* Erasmia pulcliella. 
