CHAPTER II MOTHS, EGGS, CATERPILLARS, WINTER QUARTERS

If you are too fastidious to read this chapter, it will be your permanent loss, for it contains the life history, the evolution of one of the most amazingly complicated and delicately beautiful creatures in existence.  There are moths that come into the world, accomplish the functions that perpetuate their kind, and go out, without having taken any nourishment.  There are others that feed and live for a season.  Some fly in the morning, others in the glare of noon, more in the evening, and the most important class of big, exquisitely lovely ones only at night.  This explains why so many people never have seen them, and it is a great pity, for the nocturnal, non-feeding moths are birdlike in size, flower-like in rare and complicated colouring, and of downy, silent wing.

The moths that fly by day and feed are of the Sphinginae group, Celeus and Carolina, or Choerocampinae, which includes the exquisite Deilephila Lineata, and its cousins; also Sphingidae, which cover the clear-winged Hemaris diffinis and Thysbe.  Among those that fly at night only and take no food are the members of what is called the Attacine group, comprising our largest and commonest moth, Cecropia; also its near relative Gloveri, smaller than Cecropia and oflovely rosy wine-colour; Angulifera, the male greyish brown, the female yellowish red; Promethea, the male resembling a monster Mourning Cloak butterfly and the female bearing exquisite red-wine flushings; Cynthia, beautiful in shades of olive green, sprinkled with black, crossed by bands of pinkish lilac and bearing crescents partly yellow, the remainder transparent.  There are also the deep yellow Io, pale blue-green Luna, and Polyphemus, brown with pink bands of the Saturniidae; and light yellow, red-brown and grey Regalis, and lavender and yellow Imperialis of the Ceratocampidae, and their relatives.  Modest and lovely Modesta belongs with the Smerinthinae group; and there are others, feeders and non-feeders, forming a list too long to irncorporate, for I have not mentioned the Catocalae family, the fore-wings of which resemble those of several members of the Sphinginae, in colour, and when they take flight, the back ones flash out colours that run the gamut from palest to deepest reds, yellows, and browns, crossed by wide circling bands of black; with these, occasionally the black so predominates that it appears as if the wing were black and the bands of other colour.  All of them are so exquisitely beautiful that neither the most exacting descriptions, nor photographs from life, nor water colours faithfully copied from living subjects can do them justice.  They must be seen alive, newly emerged, down intact, colours at their most brilliant shadings, to be appreciated fully.  With the exception of feeding or refraining from eating, the life processes of all these are very similar.