THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 59 



species in nature. My introduction to them occurred on the 

 borders of Lake Shirwa — one of the smaller and less known of 

 the great African lakes — and I shall record the incident exactly 

 as I find it in my notes. I had stopped one day among some 

 tall dry grass to mark a reading of the aneroid, when one of my 

 men suddenly shouted " Chirombo !" " Chirombo" means an 

 inedible beast of any kind, and I turned round to see where the 

 animal was. The native pointed straight at myself. I could 

 see nothing, but he approached, and pointing close to a wisp of 

 hay which had fallen upon my coat, repeated " Chirombo !" 

 Believing that it must be some insect among the hay, I took it 

 in my fingers, looked over it, and told him pointedly there was 

 no " Chirombo" there. He smiled, and, pointing again to the 

 hay, exclaimed " Moio !" — "It's alive T' The hay itself was 

 the Chirombo. I do not exaggerate when I say that that wisp 

 of hay was no more like an insect than my aneroid barometer. 

 I had mentally resolved never to be taken in by any of these 

 mimetic frauds ; I was incredulous enough to suspect that the 

 descriptions of Wallace and the others were somewhat highly 

 coloured ; but I confess to have been completely stultified and 

 beaten by the very first mimetic form I met. It was one of that 

 very remarkable family the Fhasinidce, but surely nowhere else 

 in nature could there be such another creature. Take two 

 inches of dried yellow grass-stalk, such as one might pluck to 

 run through the stem of a pipe ; then take six other pieces 

 nearly as long and a quarter as thick ; bend each in the middle 

 at any angle you like, stick them in three opposite pairs, and 

 again at any angle you like, upon the first grass-stalk, and you 

 have my Chirombo. When you catch him his limbs are twisted 

 about at every angle, as if the whole were made of one long 

 stalk of the most delicate grass, hinged in a dozen places, and 

 then gently crushed up into a dishevelled heap^ Having once 

 assumed a position, by a wonderful instinct he never moves or 

 varies one of his many angles by half a degree. The way this 

 insect keeps up the delusion is, indeed, almost as wonderful as 

 the mimicry itself; you may turn him about and over and over, 

 but he is mere dried grass, and nothing will induce him to 

 acknowledge the animal kingdom by the faintest suspicion of 

 spontaneous movement. All the members of this family have 

 this power of shamming death ; but how such emaciated and 

 juiceless skeletons should ever presume to be alive is the real 

 mystery. These Phasmidse look more lik^ ghosts than living 

 creatures, and so slim are they that, in trying to kill them for 

 the collecting-box, the strongest squeeze between finger and 

 thumb makes no more impression upon them than it would 

 upon fine steel wire, and one has to half guillotine them against 

 some hard substance before any little life they have is sacrificed 

 to science. — Tropical Afiica. 



