legs, extended the two long front pairs upward and laterally. In this position it was scarcely possible to believe that it was not a flower seen in profile, the rounded abdomen representing the central mass of florets and the extended legs the ray florets, while to complete the illusion the femora of the front pair of legs, adpressed to the thorax, have each a longitudinal red stripe, which represents the ferruginous stripe on the sepals of the flower.”[106] Later on, Mr. Trimen was so fortunate as actually to see a butterfly caught by another flowery impostor:—“The butterfly,” he tells us, “was engaged in honey-sucking on a white flower-head of _Lantana_, and explored each individual flower with its proboscis. While I was watching it, the butterfly touched and partly walked over what looked like a slightly folded or crumpled flower about the middle of the cluster. This turned out to be a spider, which instantly seized the butterfly, throwing forward its front legs, somewhat after the fashion of a mantis. In this spider the effect of the little depressions on the limb of the corolla was given by some depressed lines on the back of its smooth white abdomen.”[106] Other spiders resemble snail-shells, others ants, and one, at least, is like a small scorpion, but we will return to the butterflies. As I have said, except for that wonderful copy of a leaf, already described, I cannot think of any very extraordinary resemblances amongst them, belonging to that class, but there are others which form a little class of their own. In the last chapter we have seen bees imitating bees, and in this we will make the acquaintance of certain butterflies which, as it were, pretend to be of a species which they do not really belong to. Thus in Brazil, by the great River Amazons, a number of large showy butterflies are found which belong to the family of the _Heliconea_, and wherever these fly they are accompanied by various other butterflies, belonging to quite different families, which are nevertheless so extremely like them that even Mr. Bates, who, for eleven years, ran up and down the Amazons with a butterfly-net in his hand, could never be quite sure which kind it was that he was going to catch. Often, when he thought he had got a _Heliconea_ he was perfectly thunderstruck to find it was really a _Papilio_, _Pieris_, _Euterpe_, _Leptalis_, _Protogonius_, _Ithoneis_, _Dioptis_, _Pericopis_, _Hyelosia_, or something of that sort; or again, when it was one of these he was after, and at last he thought he had it in the net, he would be petrified, on looking more closely, to find that what he had really caught was a _Heliconea_.