WALKING-STICKS AND WALKING-LEAVES. 65 



Bizarre Shapes Galore. 



Almost all the foregoing forms are smooth-bodied, 

 or have merely little insignificant inequalities of skin. 

 But to increase the resemblance to vegetation, some of 

 these Phasmas have the oddest unequal surfaces imagi- 

 nable, so that they resemble the roughened bark of 

 the trees among which they live, or bits of rotten wood, 

 or lichen-covered bark. There are bizarre appearances 

 among them which defy description. They have grow- 

 ing to them or sprouting from them almost everywhere, 

 more especially from the abdomen and legs, delicate 

 small green processes or foliaceous excrescences, looking 

 exactly like the Hepaticae, or moss. They inhabit damp 

 forests both in the Malay Isles and America, and it 

 needs careful scrutiny to detect that the apparent piece 

 of rotten moss-grown twig is in reality a living insect. 

 See Ceroys laciniatus (Fig. 16) from Nicaragua; how 

 these irregular leaf-like expansions protrude all over it ! 

 Could one wish for anything more grotesque than the 

 bulky, prickly, spiny, briefly-winged giant Heteropteryx, 

 from India, Borneo, Sumatra, and Australia, or than 

 a Peruvian Ceroys, typifying thorny stems ? Or, turn 

 to the dilated-bodied spectre Extatosoma, hailing from 

 Australia, from Tasmania, and New Guinea, enormously 

 thick as compared with the males, and with both the 



