Page:Jardine Naturalist's Library Exotic Moths.djvu/92

84 towards the extremity, at which they again become slender and have the point recurved; but the latter is never furnished with a pencil of hairs. The spiral tongue is long and conspicuous; the palpi are also developed, and consist of three joints. In Agarista these joints are elongated, the second very much compressed, the terminal one slender and nearly naked. The fore tibiæ are provided with spurs. The Agaristæ fly by day, and are similar in their habits to the hawk-moths; they do not, however, possess the same power of sustained and vigorous flight as the latter. Their metropolis is New Holland, although individual species occur elsewhere; A. octomaculata, for example, is a native of South America. Lewin has made us acquainted with the metamorphoses of one of the species, viz. A. Glycinæ, which he figures and describes in his Lepidoptera of New South Wales (pl. 1), under the name of Phalænoides Glycinæ. The caterpillar has no resemblance to that of a hawk-moth, but is cylindrical and hairy, the anal segment with an indistinct tubercular elevation on the back. It does not confine itself for food to any one family of plants. Before changing to a pupa, it spun a slight web on the under side of a branch, in the month of January, in which the chrysalis remained for seventy-five days, the winged insect emerging in April.