One is constantly impressed by the abundance and variety of these protective adaptations. Instead of one’s eyes becoming more accustomed and trained in detecting these deceptions, the puzzles increase, and one becomes suspicious of everything. Every few minutes we are halted by a curled leaf which resembles some great caterpillar, or by a partly decayed fruit which may prove to be a curiously marked beetle. Many of these are such exact counterparts that we have to touch them to undeceive ourselves. After seeing some bats hung in the shadows between the buttressed bases of great trees, we imagine them in every patch of moss or dried leaves. [Illustration: FIG. 21. OWL BUTTERFLY ON COCOA BARK.] The resemblance to inanimate objects is never violated and often remarkably heightened by the little creatures of fur, feather, scale or armor of chitin. The bats never alight in a close compact mass, but each isolated, with its wings partly spread, and often extended _irregularly_, one webbed hand higher or farther out than the other, thus presenting a dull, irregular outline, at which we should never have looked twice, had not the little beasties become frightened and flown. A butterfly (_Peridromia feronia_), mottled and pearly on the upper side, snaps clicking to a lichened trunk and alights head downward with wings flat. Beneath they are white and conspicuous. The inverted position allows the hinder wings to be pressed flat to the surface of the bark, while the slight shadow caused by the prominence of the body in front is thus below and invisible. Another, brilliant red on the upper side and irregularly marked below, never alights, as far as our experience went, except on some lichened trunk. In this case however the wings were held tightly together, and the insect always in a head downward position. The insect took to wing so quickly that only a hint of the red was visible. We never could tell what new form of protective resemblance would next come under our notice. Here and there in the woods we found trees which had fallen in a clear space and had torn out their roots in the fall, forming a great bank of earth and mould, held together by the network of root fibres. Hanging suspended by slender root tendrils were many small pellets of earth slowly swaying and disintegrating. We found that some of these were not mere accidents of inorganic forces, but were the nests of a small mud wasp made in a roughly circular form and moulded to one of the many rootlets.