THE LAKE OF PITCH. 43 



feather, scale or armor of chitin. The bats never alight in a 

 close compact mass, but each isolated, with its wings partly 

 spread, and often extended irregularly, one webbed hand 

 higher or farther out than the other, thus presenting a dull, 

 irregular outline, at which we should never have looked 

 twice, had not the little beasties become frightened and 

 flown. A butterfly {Peridromia feronia) , mottled and pearly 

 on the upper side, snaps clicking to a lichened trunk and 

 alights head downward with wings flat. Beneath they are 

 white and conspicuous. The inverted position allows the 

 hinder wings to be pressed flat to the surface of the bark, 

 while the slight shadow caused by the prominence of the 

 body in front is thus below and invisible. Another, iDrilliant 

 red on the upper side and irregularly marked below, never 

 alights, as far as our experience went, except on some 

 lichened trunk. In this case however the wings were held 

 tighdy together, and the insect always in a head downward 

 position. The insect took to wing so quickly that only a 

 hint of the red was visible. 



We never could tell what new form of protective resem- 

 blance would next come under our notice. Here and there 

 in the woods we found trees which had fallen in a clear space 

 and had torn out their roots in the fall, forming a great bank 

 of earth and mould, held together by the network of root 

 fibres. Hanging suspended by slender root tendrils were 

 many small pellets of earth slowly swaying and disintegrating. 

 We found that some of these were not mere accidents of 

 inorganic forces, but were the nests of a small mud wasp 

 made in a roughly circular form and moulded to one of the 

 many rootlets. 



Lizards perhaps more than any other group of backboned 

 animals become part and parcel of their surroundings in form 

 and color. We sometimes found dull gray and green fellows 

 on the trunks of trees or the ends of half rotten logs, which 



