BODILY CHARACTERISTICS— INCONSPICUOUSNESS 299 



purple tints which adorn the upper sides of their wings. Ob- 

 servers who have watched them in the dry forests which they 

 haunt, call attention to their rapid flight, and the sudden way 

 in which they settle on twigs and in the twinkling of an eye 

 transform themselves into the semblance of withered leaves. In 

 this resting attitude the wings are folded together so as to con- 

 ceal the bright colours and expose their under sides, which in 

 both colour and markings harmonize in the minutest details with 

 the objects they resemble, even to the presence of spots com- 

 parable to diseased patches. On each fore-wing two small round 

 areas are devoid of scales, leaving the transparent membrane 

 quite bare, and when these two spots are applied to their fellows 

 an appearance is brought about comparable to a hole, such as 

 might be produced in a leaf by the attack of an insect larva. 

 Antennae, head, and body are hidden between the folded wings, 

 which offer a continuous outline just like that of one of the neigh- 

 bouring dead leaves, the fore-wings being pointed in front, and 

 the hind-wings backwardly produced into narrow tails which pass 

 muster as a leaf-stalk. The legs of the Butterfly are so slender as 

 not to destroy the illusion. 



Many of our native moths are so coloured and marked as to 

 be readily mistaken for dead leaves, and one kind, the Buff- tip 

 Moth i^Pygcsra bucephala), is, when at rest, a very perfect counter- 

 part of a bit of rotten stick which has snapped across so as to give 

 a flattish yellowish-brown surface at the end. 



The Stick- and Leaf-Insects of the Locust and Grasshopper 

 order (Orthoptera) closely resemble the objects after which they 

 are named. Sharp (in The Cambridge Natural History/) remarks 

 of the latter: — " The resemblance presented by different kinds 

 of Orthoptera to leaves is so remarkable that it has attracted 

 attention even in countries where Natural History is almost totally 

 neglected; in many such places the inhabitants are firmly con- 

 vinced that the Insects are truly transformed leaves, by which 

 they understand a bud developing into a leaf and subsequently 

 becoming a walking-leaf or Insect. To them the change is a 

 kind of metamorphosis of habit; it grew as a leaf and then took 

 to walking." 



Spiders also, in a number of cases, closely resemble special 

 objects, the end being in this case aggression as well as pro- 

 tection. There is, for instance, a Mascarene species {Ccerostris 



