Identifying the Attacus cecropia

January 19. 

Went to Cambridge to court. 

Dr. Harris says that my cocoons found in Lincoln in December are of the Attacus cecropia, the largest of our emperor moths. He made this drawing of the four kinds of emperor moths which he says we have.

Attacus cecropia

The cecropia is the largest. The cocoon must be right end uppermost when they are ready to come out. The A. Promethea is the only moth whose cocoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf, and round the shoot, the leaf partly folded round it. 

That spider whose hole I found, and which I carried him, he is pretty sure is the Lycosa fatifera. 

In a large and splendid work on the insects of Georgia, by Edwards and Smith (?), near end of last century, up-stairs, I found plates of the above moths, called not Attacus but Phaloena, and other species of Phaloena. 

He thinks that small beetle, slightly metallic, which I saw with grubs, etc., on the yellow lily roots last fall was a Donax or one of the Donasia (?).

In Josselyn's account of his voyage from London to Boston in 1638, he says, " June the first day in the afternoon, very thick foggie weather, we sailed by an enchanted island," etc. This kind of remark, to be found in so many accounts of voyages, appears to be a fragment of tradition come down from the earliest ac count of Atlantis and its disappearance. 

Varro, having enumerated certain writers on agriculture, says accidentally [sic] that they wrote soluta ratione, i.e. in prose. 

This suggests the difference between the looseness of prose and the precision of poetry. A perfect expression requires a particular rhythm or measure for which no other can be substituted. The prosaic is always a loose expression. 

Varro divides fences into four kinds, — unum naturale, alterum agreste, tertium militare, quartum fabrile. (Many kinds of each.) The first is the living hedge. One kind of sepes agrestis is our rail fence, and our other dead wooden farm fences would come under this head. The military sepes consists of a ditch and rampart; is common along highways; sometimes a rampart alone. The fourth is the mason's fence of stone or brick (burnt or unburnt), or stone and earth together.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 19, 1854

My cocoons found in Lincoln in December are of the Attacus cecropia, the largest of our emperor moths. See December 17, 1853 ("While surveying for Daniel Weston in Lincoln to-day, see a great many — maybe a hundred — silvery-brown cocoons, wrinkled and flattish, on young alders in a meadow, three or four inches long, fastened to the main stem and branches at same time, with dry alder and fragments of fern leaves attached to and partially concealing them; of some great moth.")