As I know from early experience, when a naturalist makes a prize, all at once, of some interesting specimen, for some time afterwards he expects, or, rather, feels as if he would see some other on every leaf or twig; but time went by and no more of these “vain, delusive” spiders presented themselves. At length, years afterwards, the same naturalist found himself by the banks of the Moesi river, in Sumatra (which sounds much more interesting than the Thames, for instance), and this was his second experience. “I was,” he says, “rather dreamily looking on the shrubs before me, when I became conscious of my eyes resting on a bird-excreta-marked leaf. How strange, I thought, it is that I have never got another specimen of that curious spider I found in Java, which simulated a patch just like this! I plucked the leaf by the petiole while so cogitating and looked at it half-listlessly for some moments, mentally remarking how closely that other spider had copied nature, when, to my delighted surprise, I discovered that I had actually secured a second specimen, but the imitation was so exquisite that I really did not perceive how matters stood for several moments. The spider never moved while I was plucking or twirling the leaf, and it was only when I placed the tip of my little finger on it that I observed that it was a spider, when it, without any displacement of itself, flashed its falces into my flesh.”[105] (He means it bit him.) Not all butterflies are entrapped by the kind of simulacrum here noticed. Nature can adapt herself to every taste, and in South Africa there are spiders who make themselves attractive by appearing to be flowers. Of some of these and their _modus operandi_ Mr. Rowland Trimen, who was curator of the Cape Town Museum, gives the following interesting account: “Many species of spiders,” he says, “are well adapted to succeed by being coloured in resemblance to the flowers in or on which they await the arrival of their victims. One that inhabits Cape Town is of the exact rose-red of the flowers of the oleander, and, to more effectually conceal it, the palpi, top of the cephalothorax, and four lateral stripes on the abdomen, are white, according remarkably with the irregular white markings so frequent on the petals of _Nerium_.”[106] These, indeed, must be beautiful spiders, and one would like to hear a little more of them, but Mr. Trimen goes at once from red to yellow. “I was led,” he continues, “to notice a yellow spider of the same group in consequence of seeing that two of a number of butterflies on the flowers of _Senecio pulugera_ did not, on my approach, fly off with their companions. Each of these unfortunates turned out to be in the clutches of a spider, and when I released them I observed their captors very narrowly, and I found that the latter’s close resemblance to the _Senecio_ flowers was not one of colour alone, but due also to attitude. This spider, holding on to the flower stalk by the two hinder pairs of