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Hitherto the men have preserved no chrysalids, but at this moment they have a few, of unknown species. The farmer gets strange bits of advice sometimes, and strange offers of assistance. Talking of insects reminds him of a letter received last week. Here it is:
The moving throngs, the wonderful confusion of the spouting fountains in their chrysalids of glass against the sky line, the perpetually waving fronds of the palms! "We hurried to the pier of the Registeries after Chapman had secured the sealed envelope, in which were placed the communications to the government at Scandor.
Baked in the ashes the chrysalids have a wholesome, clean appearance, with a flavour of coco-nut, and the "white fella" always came in for his share. Mickie's bush craft, his knowledge of the habits of birds and insects and the ways of fish, is enviable. Signs and sounds quite indeterminate to "white fellas" are full of meaning to him.
Them's fever-worms!" was shrieked at me frenziedly by the country-folks, black and white, when I was caught scooping up the hairy caterpillars of the tiger moths. Even when it was understood that I wished caterpillars, cocoons, and chrysalids, for the butterflies and moths they would later make, looks of pitying contempt were cast upon me.
We could supply caterpillars, butterflies and moths, or chrysalids and cocoons; we had some rather scarce ones; and then, our unmounted specimens were so perfect, and our mounted ones so exquisitely done, that we had but little trouble in disposing of them. Under the hand of John Flint these last were really works of art. Not for nothing had he boasted that he was handy with his fingers.
Tell us about it, please." "Well, I had put away some chrysalids for the winter in a closet in my sleeping-room, and one day my nurse I was ill at the time heard a rustling in the box where they lay and brought it to me for investigation; and, behold! when I opened it there was a full-grown swallow-tail, who, waking too soon from his winter's nap, left the soft bed of cotton where his companions lay sleeping side by side and, wide awake and ready to fly, was impatiently waiting for some one to let him out into the sunshine.
Réaumur was the first to conceive the ingenious idea of retarding the hatching of insects' eggs by exposing them to cold, thus anticipating the application of cold to animal life and the discoveries of Charles Tellier, whose more illustrious forerunner he was; at the same time he discovered the secret of prolonging, in a similar fashion, the larval existence of chrysalids during a space of time infinitely superior to that of their normal cycle; and what is more, he succeeded in making them live a lethargic life for years and even for a long term of years, thus repeating at will the miracle of the Seven Sleepers.
A few years ago Doyere brought to life some tardigrades that had been dried at a temperature of 150 deg. and kept four weeks in a vacuum. If we ascend the scale of beings, we find analogous phenomena produced by diverse causes. Flies that have been imported in casks of Madeira have been resuscitated in Europe, and chrysalids have been kept in this state for years.
It is interesting to note that when two Prometheus cocoons, fastened upon their twigs, were suspended in a large cageful of native birds, it took a healthy chickadee just three days of hard pounding and unravelling to force a way through the silken envelopes to the chrysalids within.
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