In the deep jungle we are constantly impressed with the straightness of all the trunks. The lianas and bush-ropes may be scalloped or spiral, or with a multitude of little steps like the Monkey Ladder, and still easily reach the life-giving light high overhead. But the trees can afford no bends or curves or gnarly trunks; they rise like temple columns. Cell must be on cell, each to aid in the life race upward. There are seldom high winds here in this great calm hot-house. Everywhere between the great trunks—whitish in the Crabwood, smoothed and noded in the Congo Pump, and deeply fluted in the Paddlewoods—between all these mast-like forms, are draped the slender ratline threads and cables of the aërial rigging. We seat ourselves on a prostrate trunk free of scorpions, at one side of the corduroy road, and watch and listen. Beside us on a tiny, dull red Mora sprout, eating voraciously is a caterpillar, branched and rebranched with a maze of nettle-hairs, while near it is another—a fuzzy fellow—who gives us one of the most unexpected surprises of the whole trip. As we first see him he is palest lavender in color, covered with long straight hairs, longer than those of our familiar black and brown woolly bear caterpillar of the north. Five minutes later we look again and see a third caterpillar—or no, it is the second one, but remarkably changed—a creature flat and immovable, covered with a score of recurved pink tufts of curled hair. The caterpillar chameleon has flattened his longer pelage of lavender into a thin line of prostrate down, bringing into view the recurved pink tufts, and thus has become an entirely different object, both as to shape, color and pattern. There must be a special set of muscles controlling these hairs. Even if a bird had appetite to digest such an unsavory hirsute object, it would well be dismayed at the transformation. Everywhere we observe examples of protective form or coloration. On the under side of a branch in front of us are what appear to be many tufts of blackish moss—until we brush against some of it and a few of the tufts resolve into dense bunches of caterpillars. Others which we touch on purpose to see if they be caterpillars or not, deceive us doubly by retaining their vegetable character. On the ground at our feet are scattered seed sheaths which have fallen from the branches high overhead. There are myriads of them. Suddenly one takes legs to itself and moves and only after examining it closely do we know it for a beautiful brown elater, a beetle (_Semiotus ligneus_) embossed with pale ivory—a perfect living counterpart of the arboreal seed sheaths strewn all about. Words completely fail to give an idea of the wonder and delight of having one’s senses set at naught by these devices of nature. After being taken in by several, we imagine we see them everywhere in innocent leaves or bit of lichens!