192 
NATURE NOTES. 
brood of caterpillars, why does the comma select for her brood 
of brownish-red caterpillars the hop, the nettle, and the honey- 
suckle, where their colour at once betrays them ? Along the 
coping and in the crevices of an old grey brick wall I often find the 
grey and brown chrysalides of certain small moths and butterflies, 
exactly matching the colour of their hiding place, and therefore 
safe ; but not twenty yards away, hung on torn withered stalk 
or twig, I also find the chrysalis of some other similar flies, 
yellow, black, or brown, and certain, therefore, to be detected 
by the first hungry sparrow or tit that comes by. Why so much 
clever foresight in the one case, and none in the other ? Again, 
our English grasshoppers are all of a green or brown hue, 
eminently safe among brown and green grass ; at Cannes they 
are red, green, and blue among grass like our own.” Similar ques- 
tions to these must, we think, have occurred to every observer 
in connection with the subject of ‘ protective resemblance.’ 
Under the title “A Famous Familjq” Mr. Benjamin Kidd dis- 
courses in Longman's Magazine about aphides. Beginning with 
an account of the hop-aphis as we see it in the hop-fields of 
Kent, he proceeds to summarise Bonnet’s early observations on 
the group, and goes on to deal with the extraordinary methods 
of reproduction which they exhibit. 
NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
We ought sooner to have called the attention of our readers to the latest con- 
tribution of our President to literature, but The Foresters (Macmillan & Co.) has 
been so fully noticed in the press at large that an extended review in these pages 
was unnecessary. While we may be allowed to doubt whether Lord Tennyson’s 
plays merit the position which his poems have attained, we know that anything 
he writes is sure to contain lines well worth remembering — such, for example, as 
those with which Maid Marian brings The Foresters to a close : — 
“ And yet I think these oaks at dawn and even. 
Or in the balmy breathings of the night, 
M ill whisper evermore of Robin Hood, 
You, good friar, 
You Much, you Scarlet, you dear little John, 
Your names will cling like ivy to the wood. 
And here perhaps a hundred years away 
Some hunter in day-dreams or half asleep 
M ill hear our arrows whizzing overhead. 
And catch the winding of a phantom horn.” 
Messrs. Dent and Co. have brought their series of reprints of T. L. Peacock’s 
W'orks almost to a close with his Slaid Marian, w’hich deals in prose with the 
same subject which Lord Tennyson commemorates in rhyme. These little books 
— the most charming half-crown’s worth with which we are acquainted — need no 
commendation to those who admire Peacock, but they merit the notice of Sel- 
bornians on account of their beautiful “get up,” as well as for the songs and 
lyrics which the author delighted to scatter through his works. There is a 
delightful little rhyme : — 
“ The slender beech and the sapling oak 
That grow by the shadowy rill. 
You may cut down both at a single stroke. 
You may cut down which you will. 
