WALKING LEAVES. 265 



grass nor grasshoppers!" "How curious!" "Perfectly 

 exquisite!" "What strange similitudes !" " Links between 

 the animal and the vegetable/' and so on, ascending. 



The above notes of admiration, varied according to the 

 mental compass of each observer, were drawn forth by different 

 specimens of those curious tropical insects, known popularly as 

 " Walking Leaves," an appropriate appellation, presenting as 

 they do a perfect resemblance in form, colour, texture, and 

 veining to vegetable foliage in every stage of progression, from 

 verdant expansion to shrivelled decay. These strange copies, 

 not of leaves only, but also of branches, are found in several 

 insect tribes and families, but chiefly those of Locusta, Mantis, 

 and Phasma. 



Some of the tribe of Mantis treacherous and cruel crea- 

 tures, with long, desiccate, skeleton limbs are like spectral 

 anatomies of vegetable death yet living and locomotive. 

 But we need not visit India or China or even the British 

 Museum or other collections of foreign insects to find similar 

 resemblances, and sometimes such perfect ones between the 

 insect and the plant that both would seem to have been cast 

 in a common mould then endowed, the one with an animal, 

 the other with what Dr. Darwin would have called "a vege- 

 table soul." To discover an English specimen of such curious 

 similitude, we have only, in this present month of August, to 

 shake some boughs of a hawthorn hedge over an inverted 

 parasol or umbrella, into which will almost of a surety then 

 fall some two or three living and moving sticks, or caterpillars 

 of stick-like form, 1 quite as "queer" and closely imitative 

 as some of the foreigners above noted. These strange little 

 animals have a brown skin, wrinkled and furrowed just like 

 the bark of the branches they are accustomed to occupy, with 

 a forked protuberance on the back resembling diverging twigs 

 or nascent thorns; while, to render his mimicry the more 



1 Vignette. 



