The said bell-jars have an even more pitiful catastrophe on their conscience. Sometimes, leaning too far from her window, miscalculating the balance between the front of the body, which is at liberty, and the back, which remains sheathed in its case, the Moth allows herself to drop to the ground. It is all up now with the fallen one and her lineage. Still, there is one good thing about it. Accidents such as this lay bare the mother Psyche, without our having to break into her house. What a miserable creature she is, a great deal uglier than the original caterpillar! Here transfiguration spells disfigurement, progress means retrogression. What we have before our eyes is a wrinkled satchel, an earthy-yellow sausage; and this horror, worse than a maggot, is a Moth in the full bloom of life, a genuine adult Moth. She is the betrothed of the elegant black Bombyx, all plumed with Marabou-feathers, and represents to him the last word in beauty. As the proverb says, beauty lies in lovers’ eyes: a profound truth which the Psyche confirms in striking fashion. Let us describe the ugly little sausage. A very small head, a paltry globule, disappearing almost entirely in the folds of the first segment. What need is there of cranium and brains for a germ-bag! And so the tiny creature almost does without them, reduces them to the simplest expression. Nevertheless, there are two black ocular specks. Do these vestigial eyes see their way about? Not very clearly, we may be sure. The pleasures of light must be very small for this stay-at-home, who appears at her window only on rare occasions, when the male Moth is late in arriving. The legs are well-shaped, but so short and weak that they are of no use at all for locomotion. The whole body is a pale yellow, semitransparent in front, opaque and stuffed with eggs behind. Underneath the first segments is a sort of neck-band, that is to say, a dark stain, the vestige of a crop showing through the skin. A pad of short down ends the oviferous part at the back. It is all that remains of a fleece, of a thin velvet which the insect rubs off as it moves backwards and forwards in its narrow lodging. This forms the flaky mass which whitens the trysting-window at the wedding-time and also lines the inside of the sheath with down. In short, the creature is little more than a bag swollen with eggs for the best part of its length. I know nothing lower in the scale of wretchedness. The germ-bag moves, but not, of course, with those vestiges of legs which form too short and feeble supports; it gets about in a way that allows it to progress on its back, belly or side indifferently. A groove is hollowed out at the hinder end of the bag, a deep, dividing groove which cuts the insect into two. It runs to the front part, spreading like a wave, and gently and slowly reaches the head. This undulation constitutes a step. When it is done, the animal has advanced about a twenty-fifth part of an inch.