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Butterflies and Moths, Shown to the Children

Chapter 34: PLATE XVI THE SMALL WHITE (3 and 4)
By Theodore Wood
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Children & Young Adult ReadingNature/Gardening/Animals

About This Book

The book introduces children to common butterflies and moths, explaining their life cycle from egg through caterpillar, repeated molts, pupal stages in chrysalids or cocoons, and emergence as adults; it describes wing scales, the coiled proboscis used for feeding, and observable features that distinguish butterflies from moths such as antennal shape, body constriction, and resting wing posture. Short, accessible text accompanies forty-eight colored plates depicting adults and caterpillars with brief identification notes, and it offers practical tips on where to find eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalids and how to observe these insects safely.

PLATE XV

1. Orange Tip, Male
2. Orange Tip, Female

PLATE XVI
THE LARGE WHITE (1 and 2)

This is a very common butterfly indeed, and even in towns you may often see it flying about. Indeed it is much too common, for its caterpillars feed upon the leaves of cabbages and cauliflowers, to which they sometimes do most terrible mischief. I dare say that you have seen these plants so stripped by the caterpillars of “Garden Whites,” as these butterflies are often called, that they look just like skeletons, only the mid-ribs and the veins being left remaining. And in some summers these caterpillars are so plentiful that hardly a single cabbage or cauliflower escapes.

You can easily recognise this butterfly by its size; and you can tell the female from the male by the two black spots and the narrow black streak upon her front wings. The caterpillar is green in colour, shaded on each side with yellow, and is dotted all over with tiny black spots, from each of which springs a hair. When it has reached its full size it leaves its food-plant, fastens itself to a wall, or a fence, or a door-post, or the trunk of a tree, and turns into a rather stout bluish-white chrysalis, sprinkled with blackish spots. The butterfly may be seen in May, and again in August.

PLATE XVI
THE SMALL WHITE (3 and 4)

This butterfly is even commoner than the last. Indeed, two butterflies out of every three which you see on a warm summer’s day are almost sure to be Small Whites, and they are always very plentiful indeed in gardens, where their caterpillars often do a great deal of mischief. You can easily tell them from the caterpillars of the “large white,” for they are pale green in colour, with a yellow line running down the middle of the back, and a dotted line of the same colour on either side. And instead of having short, stiff hairs all over their bodies, they are covered with a kind of very soft down. They, too, feed upon cabbages and cauliflowers, but instead of eating away the outer leaves only, like those of the “large white,” they bore their way right into the very heart of the plants, and often quite spoil them for use as human food. Very often, too, you may find them feeding on the leaves of nasturtiums, and also on those of mignonette.

This butterfly, like the last, appears in the early spring, and again in summer, and you can tell the female from the male by the two black spots upon her front wings. The chrysalis is sometimes green in colour, and sometimes yellow, and sometimes light or reddish-brown.