fore part of the body, and remain immovably fixed in this posture for hours together. In the winged state, the true Sphinges are known by the name of humming-bird moths, from the sound which they make in flying, and hawk-moths, from their habit of hovering in the air while taking their food. These humming-bird or hawk moths may be seen during the morning and evening twilight, flying with great swiftness from flower to flower. Their wings are long, narrow, and pointed, and are moved by powerful muscles, to accommodate which their bodies are very thick and robust. Their tongues, when uncoiled, are, for the most part, excessively long, and with them they extract the honey from the blossoms of the honeysuckle and other tubular flowers, while on the wing. Other Sphinges fly during the daytime only, and in the brightest sunshine. Then it is that our large clear-winged Sesia make their appearance among the flowers, and regale themselves with their sweets. The fragrant Phlox is their especial favorite. From their size and form and fan-like tails, from their brilliant colors, and the manner in which they take their food, poised upon rapidly vibrating wings above the blossoms, they might readily be mistaken for humming-birds. The Ægerians are also diurnal in their habits. Their flight is swift, but not prolonged, and they usually alight while feeding. In form and color they so much resemble bees and wasps as hardly to be distinguished from them. The Smerinthi are heavy and sluggish in their motions. They fly only during the night, and apparently, in the winged state, take no food, for their tongues are very short, and indeed almost invisible. The Glaucopidians, or Sphinges with feathered antennæ, fly mostly by day, and alight to take their food, like many moths, which some of them resemble in form, and in their transformations. The caterpillars of the Sphinges have sixteen legs, placed in pairs beneath the first, second, third, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and last segments of the body; all of them, except the Ægerians and Glaucopidians, have either a kind of horn or a tubercle on the top of the last segment, and, when at rest, sit with the fore part of the body elevated. Having devoted a large portion of this treatise to a description of the spinning-moths, my observations on the other insects of this order must be brief, and confined to a few species, which are more particularly obnoxious on account of their devastations in the caterpillar state. Those persons who are curious to know more about the Sphinges than can be included in this essay, are referred to my descriptive catalogue of these insects, contained in the thirty-sixth volume of Professor Silliman's "Journal of Science." 12 Every farmer's boy knows the potato-worm, as it is commonly called; a large green caterpillar (Fig. 142), with a kind of thorn upon the tail, and oblique whitish stripes on the sides of the body. This insect, which devours the leaves of the potato, often to the great injury of the plant, grows to the thickness of the fore-finger, and the length of three inches or more. It attains its full size from the middle of August to the first of September, then crawls down the stem of the plant and buries itself in the ground. Here, in a few days, it throws off its caterpillar-skin, and becomes a chrysalis (Fig. 143), of a bright brown color, with a long and slender tongue-case, bent over from the head so as to touch the breast only at the end, and somewhat resembling the handle of a pitcher. It remains in the ground through the winter, below the reach of frost, and in the following summer the chrysalis-skin bursts open, a large moth crawls out of it, comes to the surface of the ground, and, mounting upon some neighboring plant, waits till the approach of evening invites it to expand its untried wings and fly in search of food. This large insect has generally been con [12 A more complete monograph of the Sphinges has been lately published in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1859, Art. V., p. 97, by Dr. Brackinridge Clemens, of Easton, Penn. -MORRIS.] |