tHE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 47 



from the liability of the mind to class everything green in the woods as 

 belonging to vegetation, or, in other words, from our inherent tendency to 

 place animals or locomotive beings as different in color from plants. 

 When, as is often the case, they are alighted on sandy banks in or near 

 the woods, the effect is similar ; the surrounding greenness makes them 

 difficult of detection here, as well as in other spots, even away from woods, 

 where they may be side by side with vegetation. The momentary invisi- 

 bility which the insect therefore possesses gives it a chance to escape, if 

 it chooses to make use of this chance. But as long as everything remains 

 quiet it seldom flies, trusting rather for protection to its habit of remaining 

 perfectly motionless, combined with its similarity in color with surround- 

 ings. In the natural state man is not its enemy, but its assimilative color- 

 ation probably protects it in a great degree from its many known enemies 

 among the birds and reptiles. 



A fine and rare English species, germanica Linn., which is said to 

 frequent most a certain favored locality in the Isle of Wight (Black Gaug 

 . Chine), unlike most of the genus, prefers wet to dry places, and has a 

 liking for brackish marshes.* It is of a beautiful rich green, and thus is 

 enabled to escape observation amid the vegetation which thrives in such 

 places. 



Of the other class, our most common species, vvlgaris Say, is as nearly 

 invisible as an insect can well become by assimilation in color with its 

 surroundings. It is only the practiced eye that can distinguish it from the 

 soil or sand upon which it alights ; for, in either case, those parts of a 

 different color from the surface upon which the insect is resting will be 

 mistaken for particles of foreign matter, giving the eye no chance to rest 

 upon form. I have often, before I became used to the practice, looked 

 most carefully for a long time when I had distinctly seen a specimen of 

 this species alight, but without being able to distinguish it until it moved. 



A southern species, tortuosa Dej., which I have taken in Louisiana, 

 has very little of the lighter markings upon it, but is nearly all of the 

 sombre shade of the sandy mud flats over which it runs and flies. 



A fine western species, which I have taken in Kansas on the sand-bars 

 of the Kansas River, at Lawrence, during low water in the summer 

 months, is macra Lee. In this the markings have united so as to form 

 an etched border to the elytra of just the light color of the fine sand of 



* Rye, British Beetles, p. 47-48. 



