IMAGINARY MIMETIC RABBIT 229 



the nest is made. The spider catches flies, and on one 

 occasion was actually seen to run into the outer spaces 

 of the nest with its prey. The wonderful nature of this 

 mimicry of an ant by a spider may be brought out by 

 an imaginary, but parallel, example for the benefit of 

 those unaccustomed to deal with insects, and unfamiliar 

 with the important differences between ant and spider. 

 It is probable that tortoises are not eaten by those 

 carnivorous animals which prey upon rabbits. Let us 

 imagine a farmer in the country seeing what he thought 

 was a tortoise, and idly watching it crawling about in 

 the characteristic tortoise fashion. He goes up to it and 

 frightens it, when, to his astonishment, it bounds away 

 with the typical rabbit gait. He shoots it, and on ex- 

 amination finds all the essential features of a rabbit : 

 it has rodent teeth, but the external ears are so small 

 as to be unnoticeable. The main resemblance to a tortoise 

 is produced by a matting together of the hair on the 

 back to form a carapace-like structure, ^ and on the legs 

 to look like scales, while the legs themselves are much 

 reduced in length, but very thick. 



A species which " assumes a virtue though it has it 

 not " is a true mimic, and is said to be Pseud-aposematic, 

 or to have false warning colours, for it appears in the 

 guise of another more fortunate than itself in the possession 

 of distasteful qualities. But when the mimetic association 

 first described by Bates was more fully investigated, 

 some of the members were found to be quite as abundant 

 as the species which they resembled, and to belong to 

 groups which could be claimed to be as well protected as 

 the models. It was pointed out previously that a mimic 

 must be less abundant than its model. Fritz Muller 

 first pointed out how a distasteful and abundant species 

 can gain by resembling anothey equally distasteful and 



^ Compare the so-called horn of a rhinoceros, which is structurally 

 merely agglomerated hair. 



