Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/263

Rh popular interest in the study should be neglected; therefore I hope that pretty English names for our moths will appear and lighten the studies of many who find Latin difficult and ugly. It must be remembered, however, that when we wish to designate a certain kind of moth with precision, we are obliged to fall back upon the Latin name, and that there is a good deal of prejudice against common names by scientists, whose opinions are worthy of respect, but whose foible it is to be very exact and precise in their statements about a moth, or any object upon which they have special information, but who are otherwise as fallible as the rest of us when it comes to matters of conduct and art.

The old saying in natural history, that everything comes from an egg, holds good for moths. Nevertheless, modern science has wrought wonderful changes in our ideas on this subject since the days of Ray and Willoughby. The young are now considered as part and parcel of the old—a continuation, to some extent, of the bodies of their parents, whether we consider a moth or a man. The affinity between the seed of a plant and the egg of an animal is indeed illusory, but in some of the lower animals there is a process of reproduction allied to budding in plants. Years ago the poet Chamisso discovered the fact that the young of a lowly organized marine animal called Salpa did not resemble their parents. We know now that in some cases several generations intervene before the final form of the species is assumed. When we read of the discoveries in biology of Goethe and Chamisso, we see that there is some justice in the observation that it is the poet who understands Nature best. Perhaps we should rather conclude that the imagination is a quality which the naturalist can by no means dispense with. Goethe's theory of the true structure of the vertebrate skull is now accepted; Chamisso died before Steenstrup, in 1824, vindicated at least the general truth of his particular observations. A curious story is told of the first discoverer of the true nature of the coral makers. The French Academy of Sciences would not print his essay on the subject, and persisted in the old belief that the coral was a plant.

To return to our moth-eggs. While certain flies reproduce by a sort of budding in the larval state, our moths, so far as known, all come from eggs laid by the female moth on leaves, flowers, or the branches and trunks of trees. Some are inserted in crevices of the wood itself, and the little caterpillars, when they hatch, bore into the heart of the tree upon which they feed. The "peach-borer" (Ægeria exitiosa) and the "plum-borer" (Ægeria pictipes), Bailey's "goat-moth" (Cossus centerensis) are examples of certain kinds of wood-eating caterpillars. The little moth-eggs, usually attached singly, sometimes in belts and clusters, vary in the length of time which elapses before they hatch after they are laid. It is difficult to assert that there is any rule in this respect, and it is certainly hard to tell when they are "addled." When they are "bad" and fail to give the little worm, it is often