Dr. Weismann
has published a very long and learned memoir, fraught with the best
German erudition and prolixity, upon this highly interesting and obscure
subject. As English readers, however, not unnaturally object to trudging
through a stout volume on the larva of the sphinx moth, conceived in the
spirit of those patriarchal ages of Hilpa and Shalum, when man lived to
nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and devoted a stray century or so
without stint to the work of education, I shall not refer them to Dr.
Weismann's original treatise, as well translated and still further
enlarged by Mr. Raphael Meldola, but will present them instead with a
brief _resume_, boiled down and condensed into a patent royal elixir of
learning. Your caterpillar, then, runs many serious risks in early life
from the annoying persistence of sundry evil-disposed birds, who insist
at inconvenient times in picking him off the leaves of gooseberry bushes
and other his chosen places of residence. His infant mortality, indeed,
is something simply appalling, and it is only by laying the eggs that
produce him in enormous quantities that his fond mother the butterfly
ever succeeds in rearing on an average two of her brood to replace the
imago generation just departed. Accordingly, the caterpillar has been
forced by adverse circumstances to assume the most ridiculous and
impossible disguises, appearing now in the shape of a leaf or stem, now
as a bundle of dark-green pine needles, and now again as a bud or
flower, all for the innocent purpose of concealing his whereabouts from
the inquisitive gaze of the birds his enemies.
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