There is a kind of Christ’s Thorn (_Zizyphus Baclei_) which every December yields an abundance of fruit, consisting of dry mealy berries, which have a very bitter taste. The colour of these is not unlike a chestnut; they are quite unfit for eating, but the Bongo prepare a powder from them which they throw upon the surface of their waters, and it has the effect of stupefying the fish. In the parched steppe I repeatedly found a huge chafer belonging to the family of the Elateridæ, but unfortunately the specimens which I secured, together with my other collection of insect curiosities, were all destroyed by fire; and I have now no other reminiscences of them beyond the notes I took that they were of a bright brown colour and were but little short of two inches and a half in length. Of the few larger shrubs which blow in the winter, an Echinops, with splendid purple blossoms as large as one’s hand, left a deep impression on my recollection. They start out of the grass in situations where the woods are not over-dense, and rise to the height of a man. For the sake of the security of what has been styled a “protective resemblance,” the mantis takes up its quarters amidst its boughs. Just as the leaf-frog secretes itself on the young and light green foliage, or the white ptarmigan resorts to the snowy downs of the frozen north, so does the mantis here take up its abode on the tree as purple as itself, and there endeavour to find a world in which it may conceal its singular shape. This part of Africa seemed to produce many species of this remarkable genus. Whenever I saw them I derived fresh confirmation for my belief that they try to adapt their places of resort to the specific colours of their bodies: the result of this is, that they often startle the plant-collector as if they were ghosts, and their strange shape is indeed somewhat suggestive of a harpy. At first sight the heads of the Echinops, on which they settle, look like malformations of the shrub itself, for the insect uncoils its arms, and like a suppliant lifts them to the sky. Every variety in colour seems to belong to the mantis; I have seen them red, yellow, green, and brown; the most remarkable of all was one of the colour of grass, which I found upon the peak of my hut in the Meshera, and which was of the surprising length of ten inches. [Sidenote: LIONS.]