The Curious Vaporer
The vaporer-moth is very common toward the end of summer, and even in London one may often see it dashing about in the hot sunshine with a strange jerky flight. But one only sees the male, which is a bright brownish-yellow insect measuring about an inch across the wings; for the female is much more like a grub than a perfect insect, and has wings so small that they are hardly visible. Of course she cannot fly; and her body is so big and clumsy that she cannot even walk. So she spends her life clinging to the outside of the cocoon in which she passed the chrysalis state, and covers it all over with her little round white eggs. And when she has laid the last of these she falls to the ground and dies.
Very handsome indeed is the emperor-moth, which has a big eye-like spot in the middle of each wing, something like those of the peacock-butterfly. But its caterpillar is even more beautiful still, for its body is of the loveliest grass-green color, sprinkled all over with little pink tubercles, each of which is enclosed in a ring of black, and has a tuft of glossy black hairs sprouting from it. This caterpillar feeds on bramble and heather, and when it reaches its full size it spins a light-brown cocoon among the leaves of its food-plant, and then turns to a chrysalis, from which the perfect moth hatches out in the following April.
Very often one finds caterpillars which look just like little bits of stick, and which walk in a most curious fashion by hunching up their backs into loops, and then stretching them out again, just as if they were measuring the ground. These caterpillars are called loopers, and they turn into moths with large broad wings and very slender bodies.
There are a great many kinds of these moths. One, called the swallowtail, may often be found hiding among ivy in July. It has large wings of a pale-yellow color, with little tails upon the hinder pair. Then there are the sulphur, a smaller insect with wings of a brighter yellow; the emeralds, of the most delicate green; the magpie, which has wings of the purest white, marked with streaks of orange and numbers of almost square black spots and blotches; and many others far too numerous to mention. If you ever shake a bush in summer-time you may see quite a dozen of them flying away to seek for some fresh hiding-place.
Then there is a large moth known as the puss, because it is colored rather like a brindled gray cat. The caterpillar is bright green, with a big hump in the middle of its body, and two long thread-like organs at the end of its tail, with which it will sometimes pretend to be able to sting you. But in reality it is perfectly harmless. You may often find it feeding on the leaves of willow-trees in August, and when it is fully fed it spins a hard, oval cocoon in a crack in the bark. And there are three smaller moths belonging to the same family, which are known as kittens!
Another very large group of moths is that of the Noctuæ, or night-fliers. But we so seldom see these unless we go out specially to look for them that we shall pass them by without further mention.
Homoptera
The next order is that of the Homoptera, or same-winged insects, which are so called because their upper and lower wings are just alike.
The froghoppers all belong to this order. Do you know them? They are little brown or gray insects, sometimes marked or marbled with white, which carry their wings folded tentwise over their backs, and hop about with really wonderful activity. It has been calculated that if a man of ordinary height could leap as well as a froghopper, in proportion to his greater size, he would be able to cover nearly a quarter of a mile at a single jump!