Some other cases will still further illustrate how the colours of even very conspicuous animals may be adapted to their peculiar haunts. The late Mr. Swinhoe says of the Kerivoula picta, which he observed in Formosa: "The body of this bat was of an orange colour, but the wings were painted with orange-yellow and black. It was caught suspended, head downwards, on a cluster of the fruit of the longan tree (Nephelium longanum). Now this tree is an evergreen, and all the year round some portion of its foliage is undergoing decay, the particular leaves being, in such a stage, partially orange and black. This bat can, therefore, at all seasons suspend from its branches and elude its enemies by its resemblance to the leaves of the tree."[68] Even more curious is the case of the sloths--defenceless animals which feed upon leaves, and hang from the branches of trees with their back downwards. Most of the species have a curious buff-coloured spot on the back, rounded or oval in shape and often with a darker border, which seems placed there on purpose to make them conspicuous; and this was a great puzzle to naturalists, because the long coarse gray or greenish hair was evidently like tree-moss and therefore protective. But an old writer, Baron von Slack, in his _Voyage_ _to Surinam_ (1810), had already explained the matter. He says: "The colour and even the shape of the hair are much like withered moss, and serve to hide the animal in the trees, but particularly when it has that orange-coloured spot between the shoulders and lies close to the tree; it looks then exactly like a piece of branch where the rest has been broken off, by which the hunters are often deceived." Even such a huge animal as the giraffe is said to be perfectly concealed by its colour and form when standing among the dead and broken trees that so often occur on the outskirts of the thickets where it feeds. The large blotch-like spots on the skin and the strange shape of the head and horns, like broken branches, so tend to its concealment that even the keen-eyed natives have been known to mistake trees for giraffes or giraffes for trees. Innumerable examples of this kind of protective colouring occur among insects; beetles mottled like the bark of trees or resembling the sand or rock or moss on which they live, with green caterpillars of the exact general tints of the foliage they feed on; but there are also many cases of detailed imitation of particular objects by insects that must be briefly described.[69] _Protective Imitation of Particular Objects._