Natural history of insects : comprising their architecture, transformations, senses, food, habits--collection, preservation and arrangement . n July feeding upon theflower bunches of the nettle, and refusing to touch the leaves,began in a few days to prepare its cocoon, by gnawing the pa-per lid of the box in which it was placed. This, of course, wasa material which it could not have procured in the fields, butit was the nearest in properties that it could procure; for thoughit had the leaves and stems of nettles, it never used a singlefragment of either. When Reaumur found that it was likelyt
Natural history of insects : comprising their architecture, transformations, senses, food, habits--collection, preservation and arrangement . n July feeding upon theflower bunches of the nettle, and refusing to touch the leaves,began in a few days to prepare its cocoon, by gnawing the pa-per lid of the box in which it was placed. This, of course, wasa material which it could not have procured in the fields, butit was the nearest in properties that it could procure; for thoughit had the leaves and stems of nettles, it never used a singlefragment of either. When Reaumur found that it was likelyto gnaw through the paper lid of the box, and might effect itsescape, he furnished it with bits of rumpled paper, fixed, to thelid by means of a pin; and these it chopped down into suchpieces as it judged convenient for its structure, which it took VOL. IV. 17 194 INSECT ARCHITECTURE. edges of the place which it marked out for its edi-fice; then it ran several threads in a sparse mannerfrom side to side, and from end to end, but veryirregularly in point of arrangement: these were in-tended for the skeleton or frame-work of the Rudiments the Ctll ofthf Puss-3Ioth. When the outline was finished, the next step was tostrengthen each thread of silk, by adding several(sometimes six or eight) parallel ones, all of whichwere then glued together into a single thread, bythe insect running its mandibles, charged withgluten, along the line. The meshes, or spaces,which were thus widened by the compression of theparallel threads, were immediately filled up withfresh threads, till at length only very small spaceswere left. It was in this stage of the operation thatthe paper came into requisition, small portions of itbeing gnawed ofl^ the box and glued into the was not, however, into the meshes only that thebits of paper were inserted; for the whole fabric wasin the end thickly studded over with them. In abouthalf a day from the first thread of the frame-workbeing spun
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookidnaturalhistoryof01bos, booksubjectinsects
