Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/221

192 insects for our neighbours. To elude her quick senses, however, or indeed those of any native, a coat of darkness alone could have sufficed, and not even that unless its wearer left no impression of his footsteps.

The manner in which Nature teaches all her creatures to provide for their own concealment and safety, is a most interesting study to any observant person; while in some cases she herself has rendered such instincts unnecessary by so framing the outside appearance of her protégés as to be of itself an all-sufficient disguise, as in the rose-caterpillar in England which the most quick-sighted observer can scarcely distinguish from the short stumps of the bush on which it feeds. But in some foreign countries, Australia amongst others, Nature seems fairly to frolic and revel in imitation, and to keep as loose a rein upon her fancy as the writer of a fairy tale. Thus to meet with a dead leaf quietly walking across a footpath, or a piece of dead stick sauntering along on its own account, reminds one of the travelling pin and needle whom the cock and hen overtook upon their journey as related by Grimm.

I never, to my knowledge, saw more than one "walking-stick insect," but the race was not uncommon around Barladong, and the creature's resemblance to a twig is so exact that one might easily pass it unnoticed, even if beneath one's very eyes. A friend brought me a specimen to look at, and set it down in our verandah, where its movements, corresponding with its appearance, were those of a little broken branch gently fluttered over the ground by the wind.

Walking-stick insects (Bacteria trophinus) are not