Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens - C. J. Cornish - Страница 6

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A collection of tropical butterflies and moths reared in the Zoological Gardens was exhibited in the rooms of the Royal Society at their annual soirée in 1893. The fact that such perfect and beautiful examples of the frail and fantastic forms which by night fill the place taken by the humming-birds by day, in the steaming tropical forest, have lived in the precincts of a London park, is sufficient justification, if any be required, for their presence among such practical and progressive surroundings. Readers of Kenelm Chillingly, one of the latest and most extravagant of Bulwer Lytton’s romances, may remember that one of the airy fancies of his youthful and impossible heroine, is to keep pet butterflies in cages, and to shed floods of tears over their untimely death. They manage things better in the butterfly farm at the Zoo, where the brilliant insects, after their brief day is over, pass by a kind of metempsychosis from the catalogue of living to that of dead specimens, and figure anew in the list of “additions to the collections of the Society.”

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.

Perhaps the most brightly coloured moths which are raised in the house are the Eacles regalis, which are covered with a net-work of orange, rivalling in colour the inner flesh of a melon, on a ground of greenish-grey; and the Eacles imperialis, in which an exquisite shade of “old rose” invades and is lost in a rich cream-coloured ground.

Not the least beautiful among the giant moths is the splendid creature from the cocoons of which the wild silks of India are wound. This is a far larger and finer moth than that which produces the Chinese tussur-silk. Its wings are “old gold” in colour, with two large transparent eyes on each, fringed with rose-colour. These, according to Hindoo superstition, are the finger-marks of the god Vishnu, and the Tussur moth is, therefore, sacred to that deity. But it is among the wild demon-worshipping Santhals that the Indian silk-moth has its native home. In the boundless upland forests, the trees on which it feeds are covered with thousands of the cocoons, which are gathered by these wild tribes, and sold to the silk-winders of the plains. Numbers of these fine cocoons line the cases at the Zoo, each with living pupa inside. The cocoons are beautiful objects in themselves, nearly the size of a walnut in the rind, and hanging by stalks firmly twisted to the supporting twigs, like rows of melons. Their colour varies through all shades of silvery or purplish-grey, streaked all over, like the eggs of the yellow-hammer, with fine irregular dark-purple lines. The silk threads of which they are woven are flat, like tape, not round, like the ordinary floss-silk of Europe; and it is to this flat and irregular form of the thread that the beauty of woven tussur-silk is mainly due. It may be doubted whether the cultivation of the Tussur moth will spread to the West, like that of the common “silkworm.” But the time is not far distant when this, and probably others of the fifty-nine species of silk-producing larvæ which were exhibited in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, will become an additional source of wealth in the wide forest-regions of our Indian Empire.

The area of the jungle forest in the Santhal country, in which grow the trees whose leaves form the best food of these silkworms, is vast beyond any probable use which the most enterprising silk-grower conceives. “As far as the eye could reach from any rising ground,” writes Mr. Thomas Wardle, in his History of the Growth of the Tussur Silk Industry, “and for hundreds of square miles, there lay a forest in which it seemed that any quantity of the tussur of the future might be cultivated, and I think it is worthy of the attention of the Government of India to encourage in every way a greatly increased production, and not to be behind China in this respect, remembering that when I showed how tussur-silk could be used, the demand which sprang up was chiefly met by the greater quickness of the Chinese.”

Not only the moths, but even the caterpillars, or larvæ of the various silk-moths, are as beautiful as any fabric which is woven from the glossy fibres of their cocoons. Let no one despise “worms and creeping things” after once seeing these exquisitely formed and coloured creatures. The larvæ of most may be seen in late July in the Insect House, feeding on green leaves in the cases. The finest are those of the Cecropian silk-moth; they are of a blue-green, with a soft bloom like that on some succulent plant. The whole body is clothed with alternate lines of turquoise and amber studs, specked with black, polished and shining like jewels. Those that have spun their cocoons are wrapped in jackets of light-brown silk, into which strips of green leaves of the plum-tree are twisted for protection. The Ailanthus silk-moth has a pale-grey larva, with little ornaments in rows, shaped like the flowers of the stone-crop, and dotted with black. The moth itself is strangely beautiful, fawn-coloured, with bold wavy lines of black, grey, and pink. The Promethean silk-moth has a larva of pale Cambridge blue, with yellow and crimson studs. Not even the sea anemones in their native waters are more beautiful than these fugitive forms assumed by the undeveloped silk-moths of the East.

In their scheme of colour, the butterflies are to the moths what the fabrics of Europe are to the webs of Cashmere or the carpets of Daghestan. A score of the lovely swallow-tailed butterfly may often be seen fluttering in their cage. The bottom of their glass mansion is covered with short pieces of osier-stick, each one of which is pierced up the centre with a tunnel, at the end of which lies the pupa of that strange instance of protective mimicry, the hornet clear-wing. Another case is full of the scarce pale variety of the swallow-tail, and a third of the American swallow-tail, the female of which is black, spangled with what seems a shining dust of sapphires. But perhaps the most beautiful of all the butterfly broods is the swarm of Papilio Cresphontes. At the time of hatching, the case is full of these lovely butterflies, black above, with beaded spots of pale yellow; yellow below, with beaded lines of black. When last seen by the writer, some were flying from side to side of the cage; some had alighted, or were in the act of alighting, and others on the moss at the bottom were sipping the juices of ripe grapes.

Among the butterfly cages is a glass case which, since its inmates first found their way to the Zoo, has never failed to excite the utmost interest and curiosity. On the floor of the box, partly sheltered by a few green plants, are ten or a dozen gold buttons, with a red-gold centre, on a lighter gold setting, edged by a round, semi-transparent rim. If watched attentively, the buttons presently move about on invisible legs, and perhaps one suddenly splits, puts out a pair of wings, and flies. These astonishing beetles, which are at present unnamed, are from Ceylon. Above, they exactly resemble an embossed gold sleeve-button, with a rim of yellow talc. Laid on their backs, the under-side of a golden beetle appears, surrounded with the same semi-transparent rim. Trap-door spiders also flourish in the Insect House, and have made several caves, with most ingenious doors, in a large piece of rotten wood with rugged lichen-covered bark. The doors are quite irregular in shape, made to fit the surface of the hole in which the spider lives, and are of all sizes, from that of a walnut-shell to a pea. The door exactly fits the orifice, however irregular its shape, and is so cleverly covered with pieces of wood and lichen woven into the fabric, that it exactly resembles the surrounding bark; and even a prying tit might omit to probe it with its bill.

The one hideous and repulsive creature in this good company is the great tarantula spider. It is like a long-legged, hairy crab, quite seven inches from claw to claw, with enormous brown poison fangs like a beak. Two of these spiders, discovered in a tent at Assouan, occupied by officers of the Heavy Camel Corps, put the whole of the inmates to flight in their pyjamas, and the only wonder is that they ever ventured to return before daylight. There is something strangely repulsive in this low type of life, which nevertheless makes a prey of such beautiful and highly-developed animals as humming-birds, and even the small and fragile quadrupeds of the tropical forest.