96 THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S RECORD. 
momentary rest, and they soon disappeared among the upper foliage. 
Compared with such an insect, the most gorgeous butterflies of the tropics 
seem tawdry andcommonplace. Macroviphus swmatranus, Haar, a locust 
with which one sometimes meets in the Malay jungle, is hardly less bril- 
liantly coloured, if it is considerably smaller, for its tegmina are black, 
spotted with gold, its head of the clearest scarlet, its femora black, and 
its tibiee white. The beauty of such specimens soon fades, howeyer they 
may be preserved; in spirit or formaline it vanishes entirely. A much 
commoner species than either of these is Mecopoda elongata, which the 
Malays call the Deer Grasshopper, because of the splendid way in 
which it leaps along among the bushes at the edge of the jungle. Its 
colour varieties are almost as numerous as those of the eggs of the 
cuillemot. Some specimens are green, others are brown; some are 
all of one shade, others are marked with spots and patches that look 
as if they had been laid on with a brush, and the extreme varieties, 
ereen and brown, are found together, sometimes both on one bush. 
The two tegmina of a single specimen often do not exactly correspond 
with one another in their markings. For some good reason, the Malays 
compare the harsh and grating stridulation of this species to the 
crowing of a cock. They keep it alive in cages, feeding it on the young 
shoots of the pine-apple plant, in order to listen to its song. Toa 
Huropean ear the sound is as unbeautiful as Chinese music, and it is 
not made more melodious by the fact that it only commences at the 
dead of night. A most remarkable form is not uncommon, 
which, coloured in neutral shades of green and brown, has the power 
of erecting a scarlet bladder between the head and the thorax, if it be 
roughly handled. I have already referred to the Stenopelmatidae of 
the Jalor caves. Specimens of the cave species are only found in absolute 
darkness, and, though they have eyes well supplied with pigment, are 
probably blind. The further that one penetrates into the cayes the 
more numerous do individuals of this Locustid become, until, at half 
a mile from the entrance, the ground is alive with them, jumping like 
sand-hoppers on the sea-shore, and the walls covered wherever there 
is any kind of recess. They do not appear to sit on a rock which is 
quite straight and vertical, but prefer to shelter under a overhanging 
ledge, probably because water is continually dripping from the roof in 
many parts of the cave. Several other species belonging to this 
interesting family are found in Lower Siam, under the bark of dead 
trees and in the deserted galleries left by termites in wood. A curious 
point with regard to the structure of the cave form is that one antenna, 
usually the right one, is very considerably longer, and quite perceptibly 
stouter than the other. This asymmetry is probably correlated with a 
certain difference of function between the two. While the insect is 
resting, there is certainly a tendency for the shorter antenna to be 
held bent over the back while the longer one is moved round through 
the greater part of a circle. I was unable to detect anything else in 
the position which the Stenopelmatid assumed in the caves, which tended 
to throw light upon this curious phenomenon. The asymmetry is 
even more noticeable in a single specimen of a considerably larger 
species which I found in a dead tree in the jungle. 
I have left myself no room to speak about the Mantodea and the 
Phasmodea, which are in some ways the most interesting groups of the 
Orthoptera, but perhaps this is just as well, for they need a far more 
