It has, like the spiders, a spinneret and a reservoir of liquid silk with which, as it outgrows its baby state, it can spin its own arbor of tough silk fibers and hide itself from view while it is changing to a butterfly. If in late summer you will put one of these creatures in a tumbler and watch it for a day or two, you can see it plainly through the glass pouring out the liquid silk in a steady stream, waving its head from side to side. The silk comes from a spinneret which is just behind the jaws and is about the color of thin starch paste. The way it loops back upon itself and flows in curves reminds me most forcibly of the way the pastry cook, with frosting in a paper cornucopia, writes one’s name upon a birthday cake.
A BUTTERFLY’S MUMMY CASE
One of the most marvelously beautiful of all living creatures lies waiting within this case for the resurrection day, when growth shall split open this polished casket and it shall feel the wings, close packed for weeks, unfold, and, stretching to a hundred times their size, bear it away into the sunshine.
Did the Pharaohs, I wonder, or their wise men, seeing this, model their mummy cases after those which the butterflies make?
This is the chrysalis of a butterfly, that wonder of poets since poetry began, that life-stage of the butterfly which our faith and hopes make comparable to our own rest in the tomb from which man in all ages has believed there came a resurrection and another life, no more to be compared with this than the butterfly’s own existence among the flowers is to be likened to his crawling one upon the leaves. And because the minds of many men in seeking to understand, have broken down this beautiful analogy by finding that there is no real decay within the chrysalis, we must not hence conclude they have done more than brush away a fancied similarity. The mystery remains.
If you should open this butterfly mummy case, lay bare the mummy as it were, you would find a pair of wings in process of formation, a head, a curled-up sucking beak, legs and embryo antennæ, that is, providing it were near the resurrection time. If not, and you had broken in too early, the greater part within the case would be a semi-fluid mass of broken down cell tissues from which the legs and wings and all the other parts are made.
The portholes along the side lead deep into the body and are probably as necessary to the growing butterfly inside as they are to it when it once emerges. The chrysalis must breathe.