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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XV. 



3. The President said that the Paper was of the kind that the 

 Society was anxious to receive, and it was evidently the result of 

 much careful research in a direction in which practically nothing had 

 been written. 



4. Mr. Haly said he had on the previous day come across an appropriate 

 passage in Wallace's " Natural Selection " (1891, p. 90), which he 

 would read, instead of making any comments of his own on the Paper 

 before them. Wallace wrote : — " Although such a store of interesting 

 facts has been already accumulated, the subject we have been discus- 

 sing is one of which comparatively little is really known. The natural 

 history of the tropics has never yet been studied on the spot with a 

 full appreciation of what to observe. The varied ways in which the 

 colouring and form of animals serve for their protection, their strange 

 disguises as mineral or vegetable substances, their wonderful mimicry 

 of other beings, offer an almost unworked and inexhaustible field for 

 the Zoologist, and will assuredly throw much light on the laws and 

 conditions which have resulted in the wonderful variety of colour, 

 shade, and marking which constitute one of the most pleasing charac- 

 teristics of the animal world, but the immediate cause of which it has 

 hitherto been most difficult to explain." Mr. Haly added that he 

 trusted they would have more Papers of this sort, not only from 

 Mr. Collett, but from other gentlemen interested in the Natural History 

 of Ceylon. 



5. Mr. C. M. Fernando then read the following Paper : — 



