In my piece of waste ground stand some pine-trees. Every year the Caterpillar takes possession of them and spins his great purses in their branches. To protect the pine-needles, which are horribly eaten, I have to destroy the nests each winter with a long forked stick.
You hungry little Caterpillars, if I let you have your way, I should soon be robbed of the murmur of my once so leafy pines. But I am going to make a compact with you. You have a story to tell. Tell it to me; and for a year, for two years or longer, until I know more or less about it, I will leave you undisturbed.
The result of my compact with the Caterpillars is that I soon have some thirty nests within a few steps of my door. With such treasures daily before my eyes, I cannot help seeing the Pine Caterpillar’s story unfolded at full length. These Caterpillars are also called the Processionaries, because they always go abroad in a procession, one following closely after the other.
First of all, the egg. During the first half of August, if we look at the lower branches of the pines, we shall discover, here and there on the foliage, certain little whitish cylinders spotting the dark green. These are the Pine Moth’s eggs; each cylinder is the cluster laid by one mother. The cylinder is like a tiny muff about an inch long and a fifth or sixth of an inch wide, wrapped around the base of the pine-needles, which are grouped in twos. This muff has a silky appearance and is white slightly tinted with russet. It is covered with scales that overlap like the tiles on a roof. The whole thing resembles somewhat a walnut-catkin that is not yet full-grown.
The scales, soft as velvet to the touch and carefully laid one upon the other, form a roof that protects the eggs. Not a drop of rain or dew can penetrate. Where did this soft covering come from? From the mother Moth; she has stripped a part of her body for her children. Like the Eider-duck, she has made a warm overcoat for her eggs out of her own down.
If one removes the scaly fleece with pincers the eggs appear, looking like little white-enamel beads. There are about three hundred of them in one cylinder. Quite a family for one mother! They are beautifully placed, and remind one of a tiny cob of Indian corn. Nobody, young or old, learned or ignorant, could help exclaiming, on seeing the Pine Moth’s pretty little spike,
“How handsome!”
And what will strike us most will be not the beautiful enamel pearls, but the way in which they are put together with such geometrical regularity. Is it not strange that a tiny Moth should follow the laws of order? But the more we study nature, the more we realize that there is order everywhere. It is the beauty of the universe, the same under every sun, whether the suns be single or many, white or red, blue or yellow. Why all this regularity in the curve of the petals of a flower, why all this elegance in the chasings on a Beetle’s wing-cases? Is that infinite grace, even in the tiniest details, the result of brutal, uncontrolled forces? It seems hardly likely. Is there not Some One back of it all, Some One who is a supreme lover of beauty? That would explain everything.
These are very deep thoughts about a group of Moth-eggs that will bear a crop of Caterpillars. It cannot be helped. The minute we begin to investigate the tiniest things in nature, we have to begin asking “Why?” And science cannot answer us. That is the strange part of it.