ess stings, nevertheless endeavour to frighten their
enemies by assuming the characteristic hostile attitudes of wasps or
hornets. Everybody in England must be well acquainted with those common
British earwig-looking insects, popularly known as the devil's
coach-horses, which, when irritated or interfered with, cock up their
tails behind them in the most aggressive fashion, exactly reproducing
the threatening action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact,
the devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen, not
only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, and
shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. So, too, the
bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects got up in sedulous
imitation of various species of wild bee, flit about and buzz angrily in
the sunlight, quite after the fashion of the insects they mimic; and
when disturbed they pretend to get excited, and seem as if they wished
to fly in their assailant's face and roundly sting him. This curious
instinct may be put side by side with the parallel instinct of shamming
dead, possessed by many beetles and other small defenceless species.

Certain beetles have also been modified so as exactly to imitate wasps;
and in these cases the beetle waist, usually so solid, thick, and
clumsy, grows as slender and graceful as if the insects had been
supplied with corsets by a fashionable West End house. But the greatest
refinement of all is perhaps that noticed in certain allied species
which mimic bees, and which have acquired useless little tufts of hair
on their hind shanks to represent the dilated and tufted
pollen-gathering apparatus of the true bees.

I have left to the last the most marvellous cases of mimicry of
all--those noticed among South American butterflies by Mr. Bates, who
found that certain edible kinds exactly resembled a handsome and
conspicuous but bitter-tasted species 'in every shade and stripe of
colour.' Several of these South American imitative insects long deceived
the very entomologists; and it was only by a close inspection of their
structural differences that the utter distinctness of the mimickers and
the mimicked was satisfactorily settled. Scarcely less curious is the
case of Mr. Wallace's Malayan orioles, two species of which exactly copy
two pugnacious honey-suckers in every detail of plumage and coloration.
As the honey-suckers are avoided by birds of prey, owing to their
surprising strength