Mimicry in Nature. 333 



eye, and thus be protected from its enemies. The subject can 

 be divided hito Aggressive Eesemblance, Protective Resemblance, 

 Warning Colours, and True Mimicry. I am going, however, 

 to-night to show you, by some exhibits with the magic lantern, 

 examples of protective mimicry only, i.e., protective resemblance, 

 where, by its likeness to its surroundings, the creature becomes 

 protected ; and secondly, true mimicry where animals that are 

 tasteful and greedily devoured by their enemies become protected 

 by their resemblance to others of a distasteful nature that are 

 not eaten, and in whose company they live. Most of my ex- 

 hibits to-night refer to insects, and a few to Crustacea ; and Mr. 

 Lovett, the President of the Club, and Mr. Crowley, the Past- 

 President, have very Idndly brought a quantity of specimens of 

 the creatures themselves. 



For very many years collectors have observed, and from time 

 to time have brought to notice, the extraordinary resemblance 

 one creature bears to another with which it is in no way related ; 

 this is especially the case with insects. Nearly thirty-hve years 

 ago, Prof. Westwood, the eminent entomologist, described in the 

 ' Transactions of the Linnean Society ' a grasshopper, which he 

 called Condylodera tricondeloules, as bearing a remarkable resem- 

 blance to a tiger beetle of the family Cicindelida;, a most pugnacious 

 group, called CoUuris crassicornis. Now, if you come to think of 

 it, this grasshopper must have had a most remarkable resemblance 

 to a tiger beetle to have taken in an eminent entomologist like 

 the Professor, in whose collection, he tells me, this grasshopper 

 remained in the row of these tiger beetles for four or five years 

 before, after careful examination, he discovered it was not a 

 beetle at all, but a grasshopper. Of course the theory of mimicry 

 had not been started then, and cases of this kind were looked 

 upon as curiosities, and phenomena of Nature. 



Another very good case in point is the wonderful resemblance 

 the female of Hypolimnas viysijjpits bears to the common dis- 

 tasteful Indian Danais, in whose company it lives ; the resem- 

 blance is so perfect, it is only within recent years we find this 

 insect in collections, for the simple reason that collectors do not 

 catch the Danais, it is so common ; while the female of H. 

 mysippits on the wing is not distinguishable from the common 

 Danais to the ordinary collector. I well remember the first time 

 I myself saw this insect ; it was at Winchester, some twelve 

 years ago, in the collection of a schoolboy ; it was in a row of 

 the common Indian Danais someone had given him. He very 

 kindly gave me the insect, and I have it now. Mr. Bates was 

 the first who started the theory of the unconscious mimicry of 

 one species for another for protection from its enemies, in an 

 admirable paper in the ' Transactions of the Linnean Society ' in 

 18G2 ; and subsequently Mr. Wallace, a close observer of Nature, 



