" This
is an utter impossibility. The skin of no living creature will
contain eighty-six thousand times its own weight in a day. I
have raised enough caterpillars to know that if one ate three
times its own weight in a day it would have performed a skin-
stretching feat. Long after writing this, but before the
manuscript left my hands, I found that the origin of this statement
lies in a table compiled by Trouvelot, in which he estimates that
a Polyphemus caterpillar ten days old weighs one half grain, or
ten times its original weight; at twenty days three grains, or
sixty times its first weight; and so on until at fifty-six days
it weighs two hundred and seven grains, or four thousand one hundred
and forty times its first weight. To this he adds one half ounce
of water and concludes: "So the food taken by a single silkworm in
fifty-six days equals in weight eighty-six thousand times the
primitive weight of the worm." This is a far cry from eating
eighty-six thousand times its own weight in a day and upholds in
part my contention in the first chapter, that people attempting to
write upon these subjects "are not always rightly informed.
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