In Borneo, and the Malay Archipelago generally, there is a pretty pink flower known as the “Straits Rhododendron.” Once a gentleman was looking at one of these flowers and admiring it, when all at once it turned round and stared him in the face. It was not a flower, but a mantis; its flattened legs—pink like them—made the petals; its abdomen, turned up over the back and held thus motionless, resembled an opening bud. “When I held the branch on which the insect had established itself in my hand I could not tell exactly where animal tissue commenced and where flower ended, so perfectly was the one assimilated to the other, both in colour and surface-texture.”[94] When once established on a flower this mantis would remain there quite motionless, if undisturbed, until it had occasion to leave it; and of course, in nature, had any insect settled on or near it, it would have instantly been seized. The ways of the mantis are well known. “Under a most sanctimonious aspect,” says Fabre, speaking of the little green one of Provence, “it hides the morals of a cannibal”;[95] and, indeed, the female, which is larger and stronger than the male, will often turn upon the latter and devour it in the very midst of a love-passage. This it does, as in all other cases, by suddenly launching forward one or both of its fore-arms—which have been previously held in an attitude of prayer—and enclosing the body of the victim between their first and second segments, each of which is toothed along the edge like a saw. The double row of teeth meet in the body, which, held aloft, and writhing on either side of the trap, is devoured piecemeal by the mantis, who, with its sharp jaws, tears little mouthfuls out of it as long as it, or its appetite, lasts. This process, made more interesting by the way in which it was brought about, was witnessed in the case of the above-mentioned species. Small flies frequently settled upon it as it sat motionless, flower-like amidst flowers. “These it made no attempt either to drive off or to capture; its motions seeming rather to attract than repel them. After a short time a larger _Dipteron_, as big as a common house-fly, alighted on the inflorescence within reach of the predatory limbs. Then the mantis became active immediately; the fly was seized, torn in pieces, and devoured.”[96] Such are the real propensities of the seeming flower, and such, too, it may be observed, are those of some actual flowers—to wit, insectivorous ones.