Page:Jardine Naturalist's Library Exotic Moths.djvu/261

Rh portion of their body when walking, after the manner of the geometer caterpillars, thus indicating an affinity, and forming a passage from the Noctuidæ to the Geometridæ. The caterpillars generally feed on a great variety of plants. The chrysalides are often remarkable for their fine lilac or bluish colour, appearing as if covered by a kind of bloom. Expansion of the wings, in C. neogama, about three inches two lines. Head and thorax grey, the latter with transverse dark lines in front. Upper wings variegated with brown, ash-grey, and white, and marked with numerous flexuose black lines, most of them running obliquely across the wings; there is an ear-shaped spot in the centre, and a pretty regular series of small dark spots not far from the exterior margin. Hinder wings yellow, each with two black bands, irregular on their edges, and neither reaching to the abdominal margin, the exterior one broadest, and the other not recurved; abdomen yellow. The caterpillar (Plate XXVI. fig. 2) is reddish-brown, with two darker lines near the back, and a series of dark spots along the sides. It feeds on the black American walnut (Juglans nigra, Linn.), and like others of its tribe, when done feeding, it descends from the leaves to the body of the tree, and stretches itself along the bark, to which it bears so much resemblance in colour and surface, as to be scarcely distinguishable from it. The perfect insect appears in June, and is found in Georgia and other parts of America.