the proportion of about one to forty or fifty of the darker coloured ones. There are also a few individuals of the same shape as the brown one, but yellowish-green in colour. What these grey insects can be, and what relation they bear to the much more numerous brown ones, I cannot make out. Other insects, at first sight resembling beetles, are gaudily coloured. Yonder is a bush which is conspicuous from some little distance, from the quantity of insects clustered on it; they are about half-an-inch long, but are most brilliant with scarlet, blue and green. Be careful, however, how you handle them, for their scent is anything but agreeable; and, notwithstanding their gay colours, they are, after all, a species of bug. A beetle which I have often noticed in the woods is an insect an inch and a half long, but with a very long slender proboscis, with which it appears to pierce the bark of the stems on which it rests; I think it feeds on the juices of the bush or tree, and is probably a species of weevil (_Eupholus sp?_). [Sidenote: MIMICRY] Mimicry, however, is not confined to Madagascar animals, but also occurs among plants. Mr Baron says: “In some marshy ground on the top of Ankàratra mountain, I found a small whitish orchid, a few specimens of which I gathered. After getting about half-a-dozen, I discovered, to my great surprise, that some of them were labiate plants. I was utterly deceived, thinking it was the same plant I was gathering all the time, so exactly alike were the two species in almost all outward appearances. I felt at once convinced that this was a case of mimicry. At the east foot of the mountain I discovered a similar phenomenon, in a large labiate plant (_Salvia_), strikingly similar to another orchid. No doubt the labiate in each case mimics the orchid, not vice versa, in order to ensure fertilisation.” In one of our rambles near the large patch of old forest which still remains near the L.M.S. sanatorium at Ambàtovòry I came one day across a cluster of very large earthworms; at first sight these looked more like a number of small snakes than worms, as they were at least three times the size of any English worms, having about as large a diameter as a good-sized man’s finger. They are not, however, very common, as I have only seen them on that one occasion; so they probably do not play the same important part in the renewal of the soil here as Mr Darwin has shown is done by earthworms in Europe.