Vancouver and southward through the mountains of the Appalachian System and along the higher plateaus and mountain ranges of the West as far as Central Mexico. I have specimens taken in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua. The identification of the species may easily be made by means of the figure on our plate. THE WORLD OF THE DARK Sorrowing we beheld SOUTHEY. There are two worlds; the world of sunshine, and the world of the dark. Most of us are more or less familiarly acquainted with the first; very few of us are well acquainted with the latter. Our eyes are well adapted to serve us in the daylight, but they do not serve us as well in the dark, and we therefore fail to know, unless we patiently study them, what wonders this world of the dark holds within itself. There are whole armies of living things, which, when we go to sleep, begin to awaken; and when we awaken, go to sleep. The eyes of the creatures of the dark are adapted to seeing with less light than our eyes require. The broad daylight dazzles and confounds them. Sunshine has much the same effect upon them that darkness has upon us. Our twilight is their morning; our midnight is their noonday. This is true even of many of the higher vertebrates. The lemurs, which are a low family of simians, are nocturnal in their habits. So also is the Aye-Aye of Madagascar, and that curious little member of the monkey tribe known as the Specter (Tarsius spectrum). No one can see the great eyes of these creatures without realizing at a glance that they love what we call darkness better than what we call light, though they are far from being evil-doers. The great family of the cats are principally nocturnal in their habits. Their eyes are capable of being used in daylight, for the beautifully contracting and expanding iris modifies the amount of light admitted to the retina far more delicately and instantaneously than any device, attached to the most perfectly constructed camera, regulates the amount of light transmitted through its lens. The tiger in the jungle sees what is going on about him in the starlight as well as we see what is happening in the noontide. I have studied the eyes of lions and tigers in the dark. The yellowish-green iris in the night almost entirely disappears from view, and shrinks down into a narrow ring. The windows of the eyes have the curtains drawn back wide, so as to let in all the light which the darkness holds within itself. The great orbs then look like globes of crystal, framed in a narrow band of gold, lying on a background of the blackest velvet, while in their pellucid depths, fires, tinged with the warm glow of blood, play and coruscate. The eyes of many birds are adapted to the dark. This is true, as everybody knows, of the owls, and of their not distant relatives, the goat-suckers. I remember having, when a boy, dissected an owl, which I found dead after a long protracted period of intensely cold weather. The thermometer had stood at twenty degrees below zero for several nights in succession. The earth was wrapped deep in snow. Upon the sleety crust I found a great horned owl, lying dead, and frozen stiff. It may have died of old age, or it may have starved to death. The instinct of the child, who takes his toys to pieces in order to see how they are made, seized me, and, with a sharp penknife as a scalpel, and a few needles set in sticks of pine, I took my owl apart, and made drawings of what I found. I did not then know the names and functions of all the parts, but the drawing of the eye, which I made, I still have in an old portfolio, and there I saw it the other day. The eye of an owl is a wonderful piece of mechanism. It is a wide-angle lens of beautiful powers of adjustment. It is adapted to taking in all the light there is, when the light is almost all gone; and it is so contrived as to shut out light, when too much of its splendor would dazzle and hurt. Among the insects thousands and tens of thousands of species are nocturnal. This is true of the great majority of the moths. When the hour of dusk approaches stand by a bed of evening primroses, and, as their great yellow blossoms suddenly open, watch the hawkmoths coming as swiftly as meteors through the air, hovering for an instant over this blossom, probing into the sweet depths of another, and then dashing off again so quickly that the eye cannot follow them. My friend, Henry Pryer, had a great bed of evening primroses in his compound on the Bluff in Yokohama. Well I remember standing with him before the flowers, and, as the light began to fade upon the distant top of Fuji-no-yama, with net in hand capturing the hawkmoths, which came eagerly trooping to the spot. When it grew quite dark O-Chi-san held a Japanese lantern aloft to help us to see where to make our strokes. A dozen species became our spoil during those pleasant evenings. Ah! those nights in Japan! Can I ever forget them? Did you ever reflect upon the fact that the wings of many moths, which lie concealed during the daytime, reveal their most glorious coloring only after dark, when they are upon the wing? Take as an illustration, the splendid moths of the great genus Catocala, the Afterwings, as we familiarly call them. The fore wings are so colored as to cause them, when they are quietly resting upon the trunks of trees in the daytime, to look like bits of moss, or discolored patches upon the bark. They furnish, in such positions, one of the most beautiful illustrations of protective mimicry which can be found in the whole realm of nature. The hind wings are completely concealed at such times. The hind wings are, however, most brilliantly colored. In some species they are banded with pink, in others with crimson; still others have markings of yellow, orange, or snowy white on a background of jet-black. One European species has bands of blue upon the wings. These colors are distinctive of the species to a greater or less extent. They are only displayed at night. The conclusion is irresistibly forced upon us that the eyes of these creatures are capable of discriminating these colors in the darkness. We cannot do it. No human eye in the blackness of the night can distinguish red from orange, or crimson from yellow. The human eye is the greatest of all anatomical marvels, and the most wonderfu piece of animal mechanism in the world, but not all of power is lodged within it. There are other allied mechanisms which have the power of responding to certain forms of radiant energy to a degree which it does not possess. Let me commend to the study of my readers this world of the dark of which I have been speaking. Some of the pleasantest excursions afield which can be made are those which the naturalist takes, when he has only moonlight or starlight to guide his steps. Always take a dark lantern with you. Without it you cannot see, and even with it you will not see much which it might be delightful to behold. But without a lantern you will not see a great deal, and you may in the thick wood get deeply mired in a boggy hole, or even break a limb. Your eyes are not made like those of the owl and the cat. Do not be afraid of the “night air.” The air of the night has the same chemical composition as the air of the day. It is cooler, of course, and sometimes it has fog in it, but cool and even foggy air is not unhealthful. Scotchmen live half their lives in fog, but are healthy. The only things to be dreaded are the mosquitoes, carrying with them the germs of malaria, as we call it. These may be kept off if you only know how to anoint yourself with a properly prepared lotion. FAMILY SATURNIIDÆ When, hypocritically clad in dressing-gown and slippers, I stopped at my guest's inner door and Fontenette opened it just enough to let me in, I saw, indeed, a wonderful sight. The entomologist had lighted up the room, and it was filled, filled with gorgeous moths as large as my hand and all of a kind, dancing across one another's airy paths in a bewildering maze, or alighting and quivering on this thing and that. The mosquitonet, draping almost from ceiling to floor, was beflowered with them, majestically displaying in splendid alternation their upper and under colors, or, with wings lifted and vibrant, tipping to one side and another as they crept up the white mesh, like painted and gilded sails in a fairies' regatta."-G. W. CABLE. This family is composed of moths, which are for the most part medium-sized or large. The larvæ are cocoon-makers. The perfect insects have vein 8 of the hind wings diverging from the cell from the base of the wings. The frenulum is wanting. The tongue is aborted, being at most extremely rudimentary. There are no tibial spurs on the legs. The antennæ are either singly or doubly bipectinated to the tips in the case of the males, and often in the case of the females. Bipectination of the antennæ occurs also in the family Ceratocampidæ, but in the latter family it never extends to the tip of the organ. The family falls into three subfamilies: the Attacinæ; the Saturniina; and the Hemi |