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Updated: June 10, 2025
With a soft flic-flac the great night-moths were flying round the wire-gauze cover, alighting, taking flight, returning, mounting to the ceiling, re-descending. They rushed at the candle and extinguished it with a flap of the wing; they fluttered on our shoulders, clung to our clothing, grazed our faces. My study had become a cave of a necromancer, the darkness alive with creatures of the night!
I would mask these effluvia, stifle them under a powerful, tenacious odour, which would take complete possession of the sense-organ and neutralise the less powerful impression. I began by sprinkling naphthaline in the room intended for the reception of the males that evening. Beside the female, inside the wire-gauze cover, I placed a large capsule full of the same substance.
In possession of these data and this unexpected enlightenment I varied the experiments, but all pointed to the same conclusion. In the morning I established the female under the usual wire-gauze cover. For support I gave her a little twig of oak as before. There, motionless as if dead, she crouched for hours, half buried in the dry leaves, which would thus become impregnated with her emanations.
Sir Humphry Davy’s subsequent modification of the tube-lamp, by which, while diminishing the diameter, he in the same ratio shortened the tubes without danger, and in the form of wire-gauze enveloped the safety-lamp by a multiplicity of tubes, was a beautiful application of the true theory which he had formed upon the subject.
As almost every one is aware, the principle of this lamp, and indeed of all that have since been invented, is that flame will not pass through a close wire-gauze.
The sumptuous, elegant sails of to-morrow are now mere rags, so miserly in their dimensions as to be absolutely grotesque. What will emerge from these miserable coverings? A miracle of grace and amplitude. Let us observe the whole process in detail. Feeling itself ripe for transformation, the insect climbs up the wire-gauze cover by means of its hinder and intermediate limbs.
The glass was set upon a table facing the open window. Upon entering the room the moths could not fail to see the prisoner, as she stood directly in the way. The tray, containing a layer of sand, on which the female had passed the preceding day and night, covered with a wire-gauze dish-cover, was in my way.
Then come the short but pleasant days of autumn, the retreat underground and the winter torpor, the awakening of spring, and finally the cycle is closed by the festival of pellet-making. One word more as to the fertility of the Sisyphus. My six couples under the wire-gauze cover furnished me with fifty-seven inhabited pellets.
Thus do I fill my vivarium, which consists of a large, bell-shaped cage of wire-gauze, standing in an earthenware pan full of sand. A mug containing honey is the dining-room of the establishment. Here the captives come to recruit themselves in their hours of leisure. To occupy their maternal cares, I employ small birds Chaffinches, Linnets, Sparrows brought down, in the enclosure, by my son's gun.
In order to prove the efficacy of this apparatus, and inspire the firemen with confidence in its protection, he showed them that a finger first enveloped in asbestos, and then in a double case of wire-gauze, might be held a long time in the flame of a spirit-lamp or candle before the heat became inconvenient.
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