Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/312

308 of what species, is taken from a photograph of a dried specimen. It has the face-like appearance, and suggests amusingly the restoration of the Brontosaurus, in the American Museum.

Still another meaningless resemblance is in the death's head moth, Acherontia atropos, which shows a "remarkably faithful delineation of a skull and bones upon the back of the thorax." And in allied species the skull is even more sharply pictured—in A. lachesis, for example, where it appears in minatureminiature [sic] size.

A less familiar case, and as obviously meaningless, is the resemblance to a cuttle fish, which one finds in the end view of the larva of the crane-fly, Tipula abdominalis, Fig. 8. This appearance might conceivably inspire a wholesome dread among some marine creatures—but the fact remains that the present larva lives in wet rotten wood (or under ground) where an octopus-like resemblance could not benefit it. Indeed among insects one may find numerous instances of accidental resemblances. Some pupæ we have already referred to. Others, bombycids, for example, suggest mummy cases, the region of wings, antennæ and tongue, picturing both in form and proportions the Egyptian head-gear and beard. It is improbable, to say the least, that the Egyptians arrayed their dead after the fashion of a pupa to encourage a teleological analogy, for one reason, since the headdress and beard were displayed in a similar fashion during the lifetime of the individual. Striking, too, are pictures which one sometimes finds on the wings of butterflies—among these, as Mr. Beutenmüller showed me, are the heads of French poodles, which appear en silhouette on the wings of the orange colored butterfly, Colias (cæsonia and eurydice). And on the hind wings of the ragged butterflies (Grapta), as every one knows, appear commas and semicolons printed in silver upon an otherwise dull colored wing. In the group of bugs (Hemiptera) one recalls the initial W, which occurs in certain cicadas, and there is the interesting case of the tree-hopper, Membracis binolata. to which Professor Wheeler drew my attention. This tree-hopper and its young