INSECT METAMORPHOSIS
fly is a maggot (Fig. 182 D). The maggots of the house fly inhabit manure piles; those of the blow fly live in dead animals where they feed on the decaying flesh.
We might go on and fill a whole chapter, or a whole book for that matter, with descriptions of the forms that insects go through in their metamorphoses, but since other writers have demonstrated that this can be done and without ex-
Fig. 130. The life of a cutworm
A, the parent moth. B, eggs laid by the moth on a blade of grass. C, a cutworm at its characteristic night work, eating off a young garden plant at the root. D, other cutworms climbing the stalk of plants to feed on the leaves. E, the cutworm hidden within the earth during the day
hausting the subject, we shall rather turn our attention here to what may be regarded as the deeper and more abstruse phases of insect metamorphosis. Where the facts themselves are highly interesting, the explanation of them must be still more so. Explanations, however, are always more difficult to present than the facts that are to be ex-
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