A notable singer among the Brazilian tree frogs is Hylabypunctata, whose call is a high, frequently repeated tit-tit-tit. When many sing together the chorus is so loud it can be heard nearly a mile away. One brilliant-red-legged frog, brought to Washington by the Smithsonian Institution, ate nothing for seven months and did not change its position for days at a time. Throughout this period it seemed to lose no weight. At the end of seven months it eagerly ate worms and files. A violet frog that lives in the clouds and sings like a bird has been discovered by Dr. Bertha Lutz of the National Museum of Brazil on the summit of 10,000-foot-high Mt. Itatiaia in the Mantiquiera mountains. This frog, hitherto unknown to science, has a purple back spotted with gold, bronze and deep yellow. Below the purple is a deep violet blue. Since the Mantiquiera mountains, the highest in Brazil, are almost perpetually cloud-veiled, the little animal appears to be entirely a creature of cloudland. Its curious colors perhaps have been borrowed as camouflage from the sky. It has a weak voice and its song is very much like that of a bird. It is found in swift mountain brooks, part of whose courses are subterranean. _The Horned Viper Spears Other Animals_ Best-known Egyptian cobra is the so-called “spitting serpent” or Libyan asp. It supposedly has the ability to spit in the eyes of its enemies, such as dogs, and the saliva temporarily blinds the victims. The cobra was a sacred animal in ancient Egypt. It was associated with the sun and with royalty. It formed part of the head dress of solar deities and was represented in the crowns of kings and queens. Toward the end of the 20th dynasty, when it became the custom to preserve sacred animals, it was embalmed at Thebes. There is a fair possibility that one of the sixteen varieties of Egyptian cobras was the “asp” with which Cleopatra took her own life. It is more probable, however, that she used an even weirder and almost as deadly snake, the horned viper. This serpent is common on the fringes of the Egyptian desert. It buries itself in the hot sand, only its eyes and the top of its head being visible. Its two horns resemble barley seed and attract birds within its reach. When disturbed it can throw itself forward. It was called “aculum” (spear) by the Romans because of this darting motion. _The World of Insects_ The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote of ants in the Himalayas “the color of a cat and as large as an Egyptian wolf.” Pliny naively had accepted tales of travellers but the actual curiosities of the insect world are almost as strange as anything he related. There are bugs that live in ice, bugs that are happy only in near boiling water, snow white bugs that dwell deep in the earth, bugs that make their homes in petroleum pools.