The female will never develop her wings, but remain to her life's end a crawling grub, like the female of our own Vapourer moth, and that of our English Glow-worm.

But more, she will never (at least, in some species of this family) leave her silk and bark case, but live and die, an anchoritess in narrow cell, leaving behind her more than one puzzle for physiologists.

The case is fitted close to the body of the caterpillar, save at the mouth, where it hangs loose in two ragged silken curtains.

We all looked at the creature, and it looked at us, with its last two or three joints and its head thrust out of its house.

Suddenly, disgusted at our importunity, it laid hold of its curtains with two hands, right and left, like a human being, folded them modestly over its head, held them tight together, and so retired to bed, amid the inextinguishable laughter of the whole party.
The noble Moriche palm delights in wet, at least in Trinidad and on the lower Orinoco: but Schomburgk describes forests of them--if, indeed, it be the same species--as growing in the mountains of Guiana up to an altitude of four thousand feet.