Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

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It would be difficult to picture a more elegant or more interesting sight than the hatching of the butterfly-broods in the Insect House during the first days of summer heat. The glass cases, filled with damp moss and earth, and adorned with portions of tree-trunks or plants suited to the habits of the moths, are peopled by these exquisite and delicate creatures, as one after another separates itself from the chrysalis-case in which it has been sleeping all the winter, and, fluttering upwards with weak and uncertain movements, exposes its beauties to the light. The wings of the largest kind, such as the great orange-brown “Atlas” moth, are as wide as those of a missel-thrush; and the great size of this and other species increases the strange likeness to bird-forms which is so marked, even in the smaller English hawk-moths. The giant moths of the tropics, unlike the rest of the insect world, have faces and features not devoid of expression. Some resemble birds; others cats. Some are covered with long, soft plumage, like the feathers of the marabout, or the plumes of swans. Others are wrapped in a silky mantle like an Angora kitten, or clothed in ermine and sables. The depth and softness of these downy mantles make the impulse to stroke them suggest itself at once; yet when the head-keeper lifts them from the branch on which they rest, as a falconer lifts his hawk, the feeling that they are neither moths nor animals, but long-winged birds, is equally irresistible. Form and texture suggest endless analogies with the higher animals; but the scheme of colour is peculiar to the tribe of which these are the most beautiful examples. In the Cecropian silk-moths, for example, some five or six of which, at the time this paper was written, were preening their feathery wings on the lichen-covered bark of an ancient oak-trunk. The body seems thickly wrapped in feathers, and, like the wings, is of an exquisite mottled grey, the colour of the natural wool of the Cashmere goat. But the legs, antennæ, and parts of the wings are boldly painted a rich red madder-brown. The Indian moon-moth is perhaps the most delicate in colouring of all. The wings are of the palest green, and as wide as those of a swallow, the tint of the aqua-marine. The uniform faint colour is only broken by a few crescent spots of a darker tint. But the whole of the front edge of the wing is “bound” in velvet, of the colour of dark-red wine. The body is wrapped in thick and downy feathers of the purest white, from which the soft legs and feet emerge, stained to match the claret edging of the wing. Across the head, and lying back against the dark shoulders, are the fern-shaped antennæ of pale-green. Thus, this lovely creature possesses but three hues,—pale-green, claret-colour, and white; but these are so graded and distributed, and so modified by the contrasted beauty of the texture of the semi-transparent wing, the thick and downy body, and the delicate flesh-like legs, that the creature seems rather the realization of some painter’s dream than one among hundreds of silk-producing insects. We once heard the generic difference between angels and fairies stated with all the certainty which was due to the youth of the speaker:—“Angels have birds’ wings, and fairies have butterflies’ wings, of course!” was the indignant answer to the difficulty raised. Imps, too, have bats’ wings. But the wings of the moth have not yet been appropriated to the human embodiment of the unseen denizens of the air. There is a softness and reserve of colouring, and an uncertainty of outline in the moth’s wing, which mark it at once as something distinct from the sharply cut, and brilliantly coloured forms of their butterfly relations.