These things and others of absorbing interest may be seen in the truly wonderful museum of Kew Gardens, where perhaps the visitor will be disposed to spend more time in cold weather than in the summer. The park at Kew Gardens, with its splendid forest and lakes, and its Italian tower, is one of the beautiful things of England, and it has a special quality even in this season of mist and veiled sunshine. I found there recently, under the trees, as I did fifty years ago, a rare and strange-looking fungus, the _Phallus impudicus_ of botanists,—a furtive denizen of the glades which in late spring are purple with wild hyacinths. The same spot in June presents within a few minutes’ journey from the smoke and smell and noise of Piccadilly a perfect sample of what is, perhaps, the most beautiful sight in Nature—bright sunlight breaking through the young green leaves of a forest on to green herbage. And close by are the azaleas! XXXIII PROTECTIVE COLOURING IN ANIMALS Every one is familiar with some of the instances in which the natural colour of an animal helps to hide it from view. Green caterpillars, for instance, are less visible when among the green leaves which they eat than they would be were they brown, blue, red, yellow, or black. The little green tree-frog is difficult to see when he is clinging to a leaf, because his colour is the same as that of the leaf. Sandy-brown-coloured animals, birds, reptiles, and beasts of prey, are found on the sands of the desert; white birds, foxes, hares, and bears on the Arctic snow. The similarity of the colouring of these animals to that of the ground on which they live results in their escaping the observation of man’s eye, and we are entitled to believe that they escape for the same reason the observation of other animals. They are thus in many cases protected from the attacks of enemies searching for them as prey, or in other cases they may themselves be enabled the more easily in consequence of their concealing colour to creep upon other animals and seize them as food. Some of the simpler cases of this resemblance between an animal and its surroundings are easy to observe, and the value of the resemblance as protection, or as a means of secret attack, is plain enough.