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. The soil in which
they grow here is half pitch pavement, half loose brown earth, and
over both, shallow pools of water, which will become much deeper in
the wet season; and all about float or lie their pretty fruit, the
size of an apple, and scaled like a fir-cone. They are last year's,
empty and decayed. The ripe fruit contains first a rich pulpy nut,
and at last a hard cone, something like that of the vegetable ivory
palm, {159} which grows in the mainland, but not here. Delicious
they are, and precious, to monkeys and parrots, as well as to the
Orinoco Indians, among whom the Tamanacs, according to Humboldt,
say, that when a man and woman survived that great deluge, which the
Mexicans call the age of water, they cast behind them, over their
heads, the fruits of the Moriche palm, as Deucalion and Pyrrha cast
stones, and saw the seeds in them produce men and women, who
repeopled the earth. No wonder, indeed, that certain tribes look on
this tree as sacred, or that the missionaries should have named it
the tree of life.

'In the season of inundations these clumps of Mauritia, with their
leaves in the form of a fan, have the appearance of a forest rising
from the bosom of the waters. The navigator in proceeding along the
channels of the delta of the Oroonoco at night, sees with surprise
the summit