3932 The Zoologist— April, 1874. 



set before the travellers, saying they would cook something else for 

 their own dinner. They were too hungry to remonstrate, and gladly 

 availed themselves of the opportunity. The narrator says that he 

 enjoyed but two meals on the whole journey, and this was one of 

 them : but we must come to the cost. 



" When we came to settle up with our host, he proposed to charge us 

 twenty-five cents, just one shilling, or fourpence each. They had given us 

 a good dinner, and put themselves to much inconvenience to provide me 

 with a bedstead, and this was their modest charge. Nor did they make it 

 with any expectation that we would give more. It is the universal custom 

 amongst the Mestizo peasantry to entertain travellers ; to give them the best 

 they have, and to charge for the bare value of the provisions, and nothing 

 for the lodging. We could so depend upon the hospitality of the lower 

 classes that every day we travelled on without any settled place to pass the 

 night, convinced that we should be received with welcome at any but that 

 we might arrive at when our mules got tired or night came on. The only 

 place in the whole journey where we had been received witli hesitation was 

 at the Indian-house, a day's journey beyond Olama. There the people were 

 pure Indians, and other circumstances made me conclude that the Indians 

 were not so hospitable as the Mestizos." — P. 311. 



I will mention another theory of Mr. Belt's, although not peculiar 

 to him; it is that animals which are very conspicuous in appearance, 

 and therefore readily observed and easily captured, have usually 

 some decided property which is distasteful to those other animals 

 which might be supposed to take them for food : by this property, 

 whatever it may be, insects are often preserved from the attacks of 

 insectivorous mammals and birds ; there is therefore no need of the 

 protection of inconspicuousness ; they have no need of conceal- 

 ment, and appear to delight in the display of their beauty, or what 

 some would describe as the "loudness of their colouring:" the 

 wasps and fossorial Hymenoptera, beautifully banded with red, 

 yellow and black, or rendered attractive by the richly metallic 

 golden green, are armed with very powerful stings; and hence the 

 very sight of these beautiful creatures seems to carry with it an 

 instinctive conviction that it is not good to meddle with them ; and 

 it is curious to see spiders liberating a captive wasp for the same 

 reason, or perhaps more correctly speaking, from the same instinctive 

 knowledge. The common garden spider (£'pe^■m diadema)'mva\'\ah\y 

 practices this mode of disposing of an objectionable captive; she, 

 for they are always female, carefully cuts the cables by which a 



