There were few insects of very small size and many indeed were gigantic, as judged by our standards of the north. None were unpleasant and they seldom attempted suicide in soup or cocoa. They were content to flutter a moment about the electric globe and drop quietly to the white table-cloth. Praying mantises, or “rar-hosses” as our southern negroes call them, would whirr in and climb awkwardly over the bouquets of flowers, swaying from side to side and now and then reaching out for some passing insect, with a sudden unflexing of those murderous, deceptive fore-legs. One which flew on the table was a new species, which has been named _Stagmomantis hoorie_.[E] If exercise during meals is good for one’s digestion then we were hygienic in the extreme, for twenty times in succession we would have to go to the veranda laboratory to chloroform our captives. The second evening, although a heavy rain was falling, a bewildering number of moths, mostly small but of exquisite patterns, dashed in between the drops. There were almost never two alike; indeed among one hundred species captured on two evenings, there were but two duplicates. It is folly to try to describe with any exactness the beauty, even of the commonest, plainest insect, and how much more impossible to convey an accurate idea of these tropical beauties. Think of a sapling near an electric light covered with fifty or sixty exquisite moon moths (_Thysania agrippina_)—pale creamy white, banded and looped with lines of brown—none less than nine inches in spread of wing and many reaching an even foot across. The hawk-moths that came to our table were all different, all beautiful; one a study in pale yellow; another variegated green with blended purples and red (_Argeus labruscae_) on the hinder wings. This one too bore on its eyes the long shaft of a pollen stalk from some night flowering orchid. Then a moth would come, recalling somewhat the Promethea and Polyphemus of our childhood’s collecting, but with great transparent mirrors in the centre of the wings (_Attacus [Hesperia] erycina_); next, two as different as possible but which we learned later were sexes of the same species (_Dirphia tarquinia_)—the female, large, plain brown with a forked streak of light across the fore-wings: her mate a full third smaller with rosy hind-wings and fore-wings frosted white, save for two conspicuous circles at the fork of his white lightning.