334 Colonel C. Swinhoe on 



who collected for some years in the Malay Archipelago, a region 

 most fertile in mimetic examples, brought very many remarkable 

 facts on the subject to the notice of the scientific world. Since 

 then much has been written on the subject, not by mere collectors 

 and cabinet-naturalists, but by really scientific observers working 

 in the field, like the great Charles Darwin, Bates in the Valley 

 of the Amazon, Wallace in the Malay Archipelago, Trimen in 

 South Africa, and, in Europe, Meldola, Fritz Miiller, Wiseman, 

 Poulton, and others. 



Now as to protective resemblance. Everyone knows that there 

 are plenty of butterflies and moths that bear a most remarkable 

 resemblance to their surroundings ; this applies to all orders of 

 insects, to birds, beasts, and fishes, and it naturally suggests 

 itself to the thinking mind that Nature has brought about these 

 resemblances for the protection of the creatures so coloured and 

 marked: creatures that live in the sand are coloured of the same 

 hue as the sand; those living in the grass are green; and so on, 

 with some remarkable exceptions of brightly- coloured animals, 

 that from many experiments have been found to be so extremely 

 nasty, hardly anything will touch them. These come under the 

 head of warning colours, with which I am not dealing to night. 

 There are some butterflies that so exactly resemble the leaves 

 they settle on as to become lost to sight as soon as they alight, 

 such as the KalUma niachis, the common leaf butterfly of India, 

 my first exhibit. It is greedily devoured by many kinds of birds 

 and reptiles, and would be soon exterminated if Nature had not 

 protected it by its great resemblance to the leaves it goes to rest 

 upon. The second exhibit is the common lappet moth of England 

 {GastropacJia qiiercifvi'ui), on a deal board, which, I need hardly 

 say, is not his proper resting place, and also amongst oak-leaves; 

 you can see how perfectly well it is protected by its resemblance 

 to the leaves. You may touch him, and he will drop amongst 

 the leaves he so resembles, and there he will stop. The next 

 exhibit has reference to some experiments that were made by 

 Mrs. Barber with chrysalids of Papilio nerius, an American 

 butterfly. This lady obtained these caterpillars, and tried them 

 on diflerent kinds of leaves. The result was that those on the 

 leaves of an orange tree became a bright green, as shown in the 

 exhibit, just like the leaves of the tree ; another was placed on a 

 different kind of plant having withered yellow leaves, and was 

 absolutely of quite a different colour to the first one, and more 

 closely resembling the colour of its leaves. Amongst these 

 caterpillars was one which escaped, and could not be found ; but 

 the next day they found that it had gone away and turned into 

 a chrysalis on the lid of a box, and was of exactly the same 

 colour as the lid. These were all from the eggs of one mother, 

 and therefore it is a perfectly fair experiment. Those that 



