Page - 1080 - in The Complete Aristotle

chrysalis it neither feeds nor ejects excrement. The same remarks are applicable to all such insects as are developed out of the grub, both such grubs as are derived from the copulation of living animals and such as are generated without copulation on the part of parents. For the grub of the bee, the anthrena, and the wasp, whilst it is young, takes food and voids excrement; but when it has passed from the grub shape to its defined form and become what is termed a ‘nympha’, it ceases to take food and to void excrement, and remains tightly wrapped up and motionless until it has reached its full size, when it breaks the formation with which the cell is closed, and issues forth. The insects named the hypera and the penia are derived from similar caterpillars, which move in an undulatory way, progressing with one part and then pulling up the hinder parts by a bend of the body. The developed insect in each case takes its peculiar colour from the parent caterpillar. From one particular large grub, which has as it were horns, and in other respects differs from grubs in general, there comes, by a metamorphosis of the grub, first a caterpillar, then the cocoon, then the necydalus; and the creature passes through all these transformations within six months. A class of women unwind and reel off the cocoons of these creatures, and afterwards weave a fabric with the threads thus unwound; a Coan woman of the name of Pamphila, daughter of Plateus, being credited with the first invention of the fabric. After the same fashion the carabus or stag-beetle comes from grubs that live in dry wood: at first the grub is motionless, but after a while the shell bursts and the stag-beetle issues forth. From the cabbage is engendered the cabbageworm, and from the leek the prasocuris or leekbane; this creature is also winged. From the flat animalcule that skims over the surface of rivers comes the oestrus or gadfly; and this accounts for the fact that gadflies most abound in the neighbourhood of waters on whose surface these animalcules are observed. From a certain small, black and hairy caterpillar comes first a wingless glow-worm; and this creature again suffers a metamorphosis, and transforms into a winged insect named the bostrychus (or hair-curl). Gnats grow from ascarids; and ascarids are engendered in the slime of wells, or in places where there is a deposit left by the draining off of water. This slime decays, and first turns white, then black, and finally blood-red; and at this stage there originate in it, as it were, little tiny bits of red weed, which at first wriggle about all clinging together, and finally break loose and swim in the water, and are hereupon known as ascarids. After a few days they stand straight up on the water motionless and hard, and by and by the husk breaks off and the gnats are seen sitting upon it, until the sun’s heat or a puff of wind 1080