246 THE entomologist's KECOKn. 



dark or even a black hare, would be quite inconspicuous crouching on 

 one of the large Sussex beaches, by its resemblance to sorue of the 

 dark weather-beaten logs lying about there. 



I have often noticed in the spring, in Sussex, as many as twenty to 

 thirty hares in the young green corn, where they are most conspicuous. 

 Of course they ought not to be there seeing that their colours do not 

 harmonize, and the important time for the species, the breeding season 

 at hand. Show yourself and they immediately crouch, but their colours 

 do not match. If they were on dry grass land, it would be cited as a 

 splendid case of " protective resemblance." There is a way out, how- 

 ever, look again, can you not see they look like clods of earth. How 

 Avonderful ! What a wise provision of nature ! 



On page 97 Mr. Curtis asks why " the bird should trouble to per- 

 form the complicated evolution necessary to enable it to catch the 

 insect — unless it recognises it as a palatable meal," and then in the 

 next paragraph on page 98, he says, " the sparrows in our garden get 

 more food than they can eat, yet will go through the most astounding 

 niancjeuvres to catch T'ieiift rajme, etc." In the first place it does not 

 show that the bird recognised a palatable meal, in the sense that it 

 could discriminate between palatable and unpalatable. If it could, 

 surely the birds in tropical countries could do the same. I have 

 watched our well-fed sparrows catch I'icru ropae for sheer " devilment," 

 toy with them and then leave them on the ground, in the same way 

 that tl:iey nip oft' rose leaf-buds and shoots of chrysanthemums that 

 have been stood out temporarily from the conservatory. I should be 

 very sorry to attribute the rejecting of i'. rapai' to distastefulness, 

 neither ^should I call it a fair test. Yet the conditions are very similar 

 to tests that are often carried on with birds in confinement. On page 

 98 Mr. Curtis records that the great tit {Varus major) brought nearly 

 all green larvje to its nest, and asks " //' the brown larva; ivere not better 

 rrrotected why were not more broiif/ht / " and supplies the answer in an 

 exactly opposite case on page 127, where he instances the case of a 

 chiff-chaft' {P. rufus) which '^seemed to have a f/reat partialitij for the 

 brown Hijbernia larva'." He says, " to my eye the green larva on the 

 green leaf is much easier detected than the brown larva on the brown 

 twig." That may be so to his eye, but from his own evidence above I 

 should say that it mattered little to the biid, and also that the bird's 

 eyes were much keener than his and not the reverse as he suggests. 

 What about the brown larva on the green leaf, as instanced by the 

 larvse of li. hirtaria.' These larva}, from the time they are hatched 

 till they are full grown, are of varying shades of brown, with whitish 

 spots in their earlier stages, and during nearly the whole of their 

 existence rest on the undersides of the green leaves of the lime, or on 

 the green leaf twigs, and it is only just previous to pupation that some 

 rest on the dark tree-trunk, the majority let themselves down to earth 

 by a thread. They are not distasteful, as the sparrows in my b^ck 

 garden cleared ofi" nearly all the larvae in their early stages from four 

 lime trees, yet in the front garden, on three lime trees, the larvae 

 escaped, not through "protective resemblance" nor "distastefulness," 

 but just "chance." In East London, in two or three roads, the larviB 

 have been such a ))Iague the last three springs that the local authority 

 had to seek advice from the Board of Agriculture for their extermina- 



