Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/177

Rh in fact, having neither limbs, eyes, nor mouth. My second metamorphosis was even more extraordinary than this. I broke through the mummy cloth as a perfect insect. My wings were at first moist and shrunken, but in an hour or so they spread out to their full extent. I will not attempt to describe the rapture which I experienced in my first flight through the air. My former life seemed to be an ugly dream; and as I flew from flower to flower, sipping ambrosial sweets, I could hardly realize the fact that I had once been a crawling caterpillar, with an insatiable craving for cabbage. The longest life must have an end; and you now see me patiently awaiting death or some new metamorphosis of which my instinct gives me no warning."

The reader will doubtless be astonished to hear that the butterfly exists in the caterpillar, and has been detected in it by expert anatomists. "In order," says Swammerdam, "to discover plainly that a butterfly is enclosed and hidden in the skin of the caterpillar, the following operation must be performed. One must kill a full-grown caterpillar, tie a thread to its body, and dip it for a minute or two into boiling water. The outer skin will, after this, easily separate, because the fluids between the two skins are by this means rarefied and dilated, and therefore they break and detach both the vessels and the fibres wherewith they were united together. By this means the