Jamaican species, and Sir Emerson Tennent
thus speaks of them in Ceylon:--

"There is one family of insects, the members of which cannot fail to
strike the traveller by their singular beauty, the _Cassidadae_, or
tortoise beetles, in which the outer shell overlaps the body, and the
limbs are susceptible of being drawn entirely within it. The rim is
frequently of a different tint from the centre, and one species which I
have seen is quite startling from the brilliancy of its colouring, which
gives it the appearance of a ruby inclosed in a frame of pearl; but this
wonderful effect disappears immediately on the death of the
insect."[216]

If we turn to the vegetable world, what a profusion of beauty do we
find! Exquisite are the tiny Mosses, when the fogs and rains of winter,
so inimical to other vegetation, have quickened them into verdure and
fruit. How they spread along the hedgerow banks in soft fleeces of vivid
emerald, and shoot up their slender stalks, each crowned with its tiny
urn, and wearing its fairy nightcap! Beautiful are the tiny dark-green
feather-like leaves of the Forkmoss crowded on the clayey bank;
beautiful the wild sprays of the plumy Hypnum; and beautiful the little
round velvet cushions of Tortula, that grow on every old wall-top.

"The tiny moss, whose silken verdure clothes
The time-worn rock, and whose bright capsules rise,
Like fairy urns, on stalks of golden sheen,
Demand our admiration and our praise,
As much as cedar kissing the blue sky
Or Krubul's giant-flower. God made them all,
And what _He_ deigns to make should ne'er be deem'd
Unworthy of our study."

Exquisite too are the Ferns, in their arching fronds, so richly cut in
elegant tracery. See a fine crown of the Lady Fern in a shaded
Devonshire lane, and confess that grace and beauty are triumphant there.
And in the saturated atmosphere of the tropical islands, where these
lovely plants form a very large proportion of the entire vegetation, and
some of them rise on slender stems thirty or forty feet in altitude,
from the summit of which the wide-spreading fronds arch gracefully on
every side, like a vast umbrella of twinkling verdure, through whose
filagree work the sunbeams are sparkling,--what can be more charming
than Ferns?

The queenly Palms, too, are models of stately beauty. Linnaeus called
them _vegetabilium principes_; and, when we see them in some noble
conservatory of ad