paLjEmon. 129 



open pincers ready to seize, and feet and expanded tail pre- 

 pared in a twinkling to dart backward on the least alarm. 

 Look then at his cephalo-ihorax, or what you would per- 

 haps call the head, the cylindrical shield that you would 

 pick off as the first essay towards eating him. Its ground- 

 colour is a greenish-grey, but so translucent that we can 

 hardly assign any hue-proper to it ; this is marked with 

 several stripes of rich deep brown, running longitudinally, 

 each stripe being edged with buff. Then the body, or more 

 correctly the abdomen, is marked with about a dozen stripes 

 of similar colour, but set transversely, girding the segments 

 round with a series of dark lines; and the last segment 

 before the setting on cf the lail-fins has three lines running 

 lengthwise again. Now we come to the tail. But here 

 the pen fails; only the pencil could convey an adequate 

 idea of this exquisitely painted organ. The four oval plates 

 that play over each other, and that form a broad and power- 

 ful fin when expanded, are bordered with a pale red band ; 

 the outer pair have in the centre a red spot, the inner pair 

 a streak of the same hue ; each plate has near its extre- 

 mity a spot of cream white (much larger on the outer 

 pair), made more conspicuous by being broadly margined 

 by reddish-brown. Finally, the plates are studded all over 



K 



