THE REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS
The ovaries in the female butterfly are sometimes so large as to crowd the other organs in the abdominal cavity. They communicate by means of tubes called oviducts with the copulatory apparatus at the end of the abdomen. The testes of the male butterfly are usually combined into a single organ; they discharge the seminal fluid into the vas deferens, whence it is conducted to a sort of pouch near the penultimate segment of the abdomen. In copulation the ends of the male and female abdomens are locked together by certain clasping appendages, and the seminal fluid of the male is forced into the body of the female, where it meets and fertilizes the eggs as they descend from the ovaries.
CHAPTER III
BUTTERFLY METAMORPHOSIS
Some insects, grasshoppers for example, pass through an incomplete metamorphosis; that is, the young grasshopper is very much like its parents except as regards size. This is the same sort of development found among birds, reptiles, and other vertebrates. The egg of a butterfly, however, does not hatch into a miniature replica of its parents, but into an altogether different sort of creature, which must pass through a complete metamorphosis before it becomes a butterfly. To put the matter briefly, there are four distinct stages in the life of a butterfly: the egg, the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the imago, or butterfly proper.