A comfortable house, tightly closed and well-caulked, proof against rain and snow. We, to guard ourselves against draughts, put sand-bags against the cracks of our doors and windows; the extravagant little Arbutus Caterpillar applies pipings of silk-velvet to his shutters. Things should be cosy inside, however damp the fog. In bad weather, the rain drips into my house. The leaf-dwelling knows nothing of such troubles, so true is it that animals often enjoy advantages which relegate human industry to the second rank. In this shelter of silk and foliage, the worst three or four months of the year are passed in a state of complete abstinence. No outings; not a bite of food. In March, this torpor ceases; and the recluses, those starving bellies, shift their quarters. The community now splits up into squads, which spread themselves anyhow over the adjacent verdure. This is the period of serious devastation. The caterpillars no longer confine themselves to nibbling one surface of the leaf; their keen appetites demand the whole of it, down to the stalk. And now, stage by stage, halt by halt, the arbutus is shorn bare. The vagabonds do not return to their winter dwelling, which has become too closely cramped. They reassemble in groups and weave, here, there and everywhere, shapeless tents, temporary huts, abandoned for others as the pasturage round about becomes exhausted. The denuded boughs, to all seeming ravaged by fire, take on the look of squalid drying-grounds hung with rags. In June, having acquired their full growth, the caterpillars leave the arbutus-tree, descend to earth and spin themselves, amid the dead leaves, a niggardly cocoon, in which the insect’s hairs to some extent supplement its silk. A month later, the Bombyx appears. In his final dimensions, the caterpillar measures nearly an inch and a quarter in length. His costume does not lack richness or originality: a black skin with a double row of orange specks on the back; long grey hairs arranged in bunches; short, snow-white tufts on the sides; and a couple of brown-velvet protuberances on the first two rings of the abdomen and also on the last ring but one. The most remarkable feature, however, consists of two tiny craters, always open wide; two cunningly fashioned goblets which might have been wrought from a drop of red sealing-wax. The sixth and seventh segments of the abdomen are the only ones that bear these vermilion goblets, placed in the middle of the back. I do not know the function of these little cups. Perhaps they should be regarded as organs of information, similar to the Pine Processionary’s dorsal mouths.