Cornell Nature-Study Leaflets: Being a selection, with revision, from the teachers' leaflets, home nature-study lessons, junior naturalist monthlies and other publications from the College of Agriculture, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., 1896-1904New York State College of Agriculture
History
Cornell Nature-Study Leaflets: Being a selection, with revision, from the teachers' leaflets, home nature-study lessons, junior naturalist monthlies and other publications from the College of Agriculture, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., 1896-1904
New York State College of Agriculture
Natural history; Nature study
No one knows better than golden-eyes what her children are capable of
doing when on a foraging tour. For this reason she places her eggs high
on silken stalks (Fig. 345). If she laid them on the leaf close
together, the first aphis-lion hatched would not give the other members
of his family a chance to open their eyes, nor to know how pleasant it
is to live on a green leaf. As it is he walks down the silken stalk and
finds himself among the aphids. Then, when he has proved himself the
gardener's friend by devouring a great many of the small green insects,
he spins a pearly white cocoon and out of this comes a lace-winged-fly
with glistening golden eyes. If one of these dainty creatures comes to
live in your terrarium, you may notice some day that it has a
disagreeable odor. This is a characteristic that many insects possess,
and owing to it the birds do not like to eat them.
There is another insect out in the garden that ought to be an inmate of
every terrarium this fall, the green cabbage-worm. Some Junior gardeners
will object to calling this a friendly little neighbor, but you will
find that he will teach you many new things, in this way proving himself
friendly to you as a naturalist. You must remember that these green
caterpillars did not know that you had planted the garden in which they
worked destruction. They did not know that you wanted to send the very
best cabbage to the State fair. They knew only that when they opened
their eyes they were on a green leaf and it was good to eat.
Probably you will find the eggs of the cabbage butterfly on the under
side of the leaves. Then you can feed the young caterpillars when they
hatch. They will, of course, prefer cabbage leaves. If you miss them
some day, search in the terrarium for the chrysalids into which they
have changed. These chrysalids sometimes imitate the color of the
support from which they hang, and you may have difficulty in finding
them. For this reason it may be well to keep one of the caterpillars
under a lamp chimney, the top of which has been covered with mosquito
netting (Fig. 342), so that you may know how the chrysalids look.
The cabbage butterflies are familiar to most boys and girls; yet as they
come out of the chrysalid state in your terrarium, you will be able to
observe them more closely. Notice that the wings are dull white on the
upper sides, while on the under side the apex of the fore wings and the
entire surface of the hind wings are pale lemon yellow. In the female
you will find that there are two black spots besides the tip on each of
the fore wings, and in the male there is but one.
[Illustration: _Fig. 342. An insect cage._]
Now that I have put you in the way to find a few members of the insect
world for your terrarium, I am going to ask you to think about some
other outdoor-folk that naturalists learn to like.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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