STRICTLY INCOG. 67 



known as the devil's coacli-horses, which, when irritated or 

 interfered with, cock up their tails hehind them in the most 

 ag^essive fashion, exactly reproducing the threatening 

 action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact, the 

 devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen, 

 not only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, 

 and shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. 

 So, too, the bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects 

 got up in sedulous imitation of various species of wild bee, 

 flit about and buzz angrily in the sunlight, quite after the 

 fashion of the insects they mimic ; and when disturbed 

 they pretend to get excited, and seem as if they wished to 

 fly in their assailant's face and roundly sting him. This 

 curious instinct may be put side by side with the parallel 

 instinct of shamming dead, possessed by many beetles and 

 other small defenceless species. 



Certain beetles have also been modified so as exactly to 

 imitate wasps ; and in these cases the beetle waist, usually 

 so solid, thick, and clumsy, grows as slender and graceful 

 as if the insects had been supplied with corsets by a 

 fashionable "West End house. But the greatest refine- 

 ment of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied 

 species which mimic bees, and which have acquired use- 

 less little tufts of hair on their hind shanks to represent 

 the dilated and tufted pollen-gathering apparatus of the 

 true bees. 



I have left to the last the most marvellous cases of 

 mimicry of all — those noticed among South American 

 butterflies by Mr. Bates, who found that certain edible 

 kinds exactly resembled a handsome and conspicuous but 

 bitter-tasted species * in every shade and stripe of colour.' 

 Several of these South American imitative insects long 

 deceived the very entomologists ; and it was only by a close 

 inspection of their structural differences that the utter 



