INSECTS
usually becomes restless, leaves the empty skin (19), and takes up a new position several inches away (20).
At this stage the cicada is strangely beautiful. Its creamy-yellow paleness, intensified by the great black patches just behind the head and relieved by the pearly flesh tint of the mesothoracic shield, its shining red eyes, and the milky, semitransparent wings with deep chrome on their bases make a unique impression on the mind. There is a look of unreality about the thing, which out of doors (Plate 6) becomes a ghostlike vision against the night. But, even as we watch, the color changes; the unearthly paleness is suffused with bluish gray, which deepens to blackish gray; the wings flutter, fold against the back, and the spell is broken—an insect sits in the place of the vanished specter.
The rest is commonplace. The colors deepen, the grays become blackish and then black, and after a few hours the creature has all the characters of a fully matured cicada. Early the next morning it is fluttering about, restless to be off with its mates to the woods.
The time consumed by the entire performance, from the splitting of the skin (Fig. 118, 5) to the folding of the wings above the back (21), varies with different individuals, observed at the same time and under the same conditions, from forty-five minutes to one hour and twelve minutes. Most of the insects have issued from the nymphal skins before eleven o'clock at night, but occasionally a straggler may be seen in the last act as late as nine o'clock the following morning—probably a belated arrival who overslept the night before.
Thus, to the eye, the burrowing and crawling creature of the earth becomes transfigured to a creature of the air; vet the visible change is mostly but the final escape of the mature insect from the skin of its preceding stage. Aside from a few last adjustments and the expansion of the wings, the real change has been in progress within the nymphal skin perhaps for years. We do not truly witness
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