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The old ones had just passed through the molting season, and their new wing feathers were not long enough to bear them, and the young ones, though nearly full grown, had not yet learned to fly.
Seeley or he will still be running us ragged to get in shape a couple of yrs. after the last of the Dutchmens lays molting in the grave.
After I retired from mercantile pursuits and went to London and had time, I made as far as possible a complete mathematical and scientific "molting," as Liebig calls it, and spent the best part of eight years on it. I was occupied with this molting process when it chanced that I was called upon to busy myself with Herr Duehring's so-called philosophy.
August, the Molting Moon, went by; the young ones were now three parts grown. They knew just enough to think themselves wonderfully wise. When they were small it was necessary to sleep on the ground so their mother could shelter them, but now they were too big to need that, and the mother began to introduce grown-up ways of life. It was time to roost in the trees.
"I've never got my winter feathers so soon.... I fear you're mistaken," she told Aunt Polly. "Oh, no! I'm not mistaken," Aunt Polly Woodchuck insisted. "I know it's early for molting but haven't you noticed that the wheat grew big this year, and that the bark on young trees is thick?
"I don't see what all this has to do with molting." "Some of those signs," Aunt Polly explained, "mean an early winter; and some of 'em mean a cold one. I've never known 'em to fail. And you're molting early so you'll have a good warm coat of feathers by the time winter comes." Well, Henrietta Hen began to feel better at once. She actually smiled something she had not done for days. "Thank you!
Well, then the angel that was molting for the musical comedy lost his last feather and the company broke up. The ponies trotted away and I was left in the window ownerless. The janitor gave me to a refined comedy team on the eighth floor, and in six weeks I had been set in the window of five different flats I took on experience and put out two more leaves.
In a few days the outer skin becomes rather firm and inelastic so it will not allow further growth. Then a new skin forms underneath and the old skin is cast off. This process of casting off the old skin is called molting, and is repeated four times during the one, two, three or more weeks of larval life.
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