Butterflies and Moths (British)Furneaux, William S.
Science
Butterflies and Moths (British)
Furneaux, William S.
Butterflies -- Great Britain; Moths -- Great Britain
The pupa (page 45) is greenish or yellowish white, striped with bright
yellow, and spotted with black.
It is probable that the reader will never meet with this insect in any
of its stages. But, though it may have left us, it is still very
abundant on the Continent, where it does great damage to fruit trees;
and the foreign pupae may be purchased of English dealers.
_The Large White_ (_Pieris Brassicae_)
We pass now from one of the rarest to one of the most abundant of
British butterflies. Everybody has seen the 'Large White,' though we
doubt whether everybody knows that this insect is not of the same
species as the two other very common 'Whites.' The three--Large, Small,
and Green-veined--are so much alike in general colour and markings, and
so similar in their habits and in the selection of their food plants,
that the non-entomological, not knowing that insects do not grow in
their perfect state, may perhaps regard the larger and the smaller as
older and younger members of the same species. But no--they are three
distinct species, exhibiting to a careful observer many important marks
by which each may be known from the other two.
On Plate I (fig. 3) will be seen a picture of the female _Brassicae_, in
which the following markings are depicted: On each fore wing--a blotch
at the tip, a round spot near the centre, another round one nearer the
inner margin, and a tapering spot on the inner margin with its point
toward the base of the wing. On the hind wings there is only one spot,
situated near the middle of the costal margin.
The male may be readily distinguished by the absence of the black
markings on the fore wings, with the exception of those at the tips. He
is also a trifle smaller than his mate.
This butterfly is double-brooded. The first brood appears in April and
May, the second in July and August; and the former--the spring
brood--which emerges from the chrysalides that have hybernated during
the winter, have _grey_ rather than black tips to the front wings.
The ova of _Brassicae_ may be found on the leaves of cabbages in every
kitchen garden, also on the nasturtium, during May and July. They are
pretty objects (see fig. 10), something like little bottles or
sculptured vases standing on end, and are arranged either singly or in
little groups.
As soon as the young larvae are out--from ten to fifteen days after the
eggs are deposited--having devoured their shells, they start feeding on
the selfsame spot, and afterwards wander about, dealing out destruction
as they go, till little remains of their food plant save the mere stumps
and skeletons of the leaves.
The ground colour of the caterpillar is bluish green. It has a narrow
yellow stripe down the middle of the back, and two similar but wider
stripes along the sides; and the surface of the body is rendered
somewhat rough by a number of small black warty projections, from each
of which arises a short hair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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