Although the Sitaris, on assuming the form of the pseudochrysalis, is transfigured outwardly to the point of baffling the science of entomological phases, this is not so inwardly. I have at every season of the year examined the viscera of the pseudochrysalids, which generally remain stationary for a whole year, and I have never observed other forms among their organs than those which we find in the secondary larva. The nervous system has undergone no change. The digestive apparatus is absolutely void and, because of its emptiness, appears only as a thin cord, sunk, lost amid the adipose sacs. The stercoral intestine has more substance; its outlines are better defined. The four gall-bladders are always perfectly distinct. The adipose tissue is more abundant than ever: it forms by itself the whole contents of the pseudochrysalis, for in the matter of volume the insignificant threads of the nervous system and the digestive apparatus count for nothing. It is the reserve upon which life must draw for its future labours.
A few Sitares remain hardly a month in the pseudochrysalis stage. The other phases are achieved in the course of August; and at the beginning of September the insect attains the perfect state. But as a rule the development is slower; the pseudochrysalis goes through the winter; and it is not, at the earliest, until June in the second year that the final transformations take place. Let us pass in silence over this long period of repose, during which the Sitaris, in the form of a pseudochrysalis, slumbers at the bottom of its cell, in a sleep as lethargic as that of a germ in its egg, and come to the months of June and July in the following year, the period of what we might call a second hatching.
The pseudochrysalis is still enclosed in the delicate pouch formed of the skin of the secondary larva. Outside, nothing fresh has happened; but important changes have taken place inside. I have said that the pseudochrysalis displayed an upper surface arched like a hog's back and a lower surface at first flat and then more and more concave. The sides of the double inclined plane of the upper or dorsal surface also share in this depression occasioned by the evaporation of the fluid constituents; and a time comes when these sides are so depressed that a section of the pseudochrysalis through a plane perpendicular to its axis would be represented by a curvilinear triangle with blunted corners and inwardly convex sides. This is the appearance displayed by the pseudochrysalis during the winter and spring.