Human life and especially human warfare are rich in deceptions, wiles, and stratagems. We dig pitfalls for wild beasts, carefully concealed by grass and branches; we take in the unsuspecting fish with artificial flies, or catch them with worms which conceal a hook treacherously barbed for their surer destruction. The savage paints his face and sticks feathers in his hair so that he may look more terrifying to his expected enemy; civilized men mask their batteries, and sometimes even paint muzzles of imaginary guns in the spaces between the gaping mouths of the real ones. _Chevaux de frise_ block the way to points liable to attack; real troops lie in ambush and dart out unexpectedly in the rear of the assailants. Trade in like manner is full of shams--a fact which I need hardly impress by means of special examples. But Nature we are usually accustomed to consider as innocent and truthful. Alas, too trustfully: for Nature too is a gay deceiver. There is hardly a device invented by man which she has not anticipated: hardly a trick or ruse in his stock of wiles which she did not find out for herself long before he showed her. I propose in this paper to examine a few cases of such natural deceptions--not indeed the most striking or typical, but such as occur among fairly well-known English plants and animals. And I shall begin with our familiar and unsavoury old friend, the Devil's Coach-horse. [Illustration: 1.--A BATTLE ROYAL: SCORPION V. SPIDER: THE SCORPION STRIKING.] In order fully to understand his mode of procedure, however, I must first call your attention to another animal which really _is_ what the Devil's Coach-horse mendaciously pretends to be: and that is the common scorpion. His mode of fighting is well known to most of us. In illustration No. 1 Mr. Enock has given us a delineation of a frantic death-struggle between such a scorpion and a large and powerful southern spider. The venomous creature with the stinging tail is on the left; the spider is on the right. As far as mere size goes, the antagonists are fairly well matched: but the scorpion is the best armed, both with offensive and defensive armour. His lobster-like or crab-like claws enable him to hold his enemy's limbs in his grip as in a vice: then, at the critical moment, he bends over his tail, in the extremity of which his sting is situated, and plunges it with force through the comparatively slight skin of the spider's body or thorax, injecting at the same moment a pungent drop of his deadly poison. This characteristic action of the scorpion in curving its tail over its body and raising its sting in a menacing attitude is well known to birds and other enemies of the species: often the mere threat of a thrust is a sufficient deterrent: the dangerous beast just elevates its poisonous appendage or assumes an angry mien, and the inquisitive intruder is frightened away immediately. It is the same with ourselves. The bare sight of that uplifted sting suffices to repel us.