Falling in Love, page 49 by Grant Allen
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is a certain butterfly in the islands of the Malay Archipelago (its learned name, if anybody wishes to be formally introduced, is Kallima paralekta) which always rests among dead or dry leaves, and has itself leaf-like wings, all spotted over at intervals with wee speckles to imitate the tiny spots of fungi on the foliage it resembles. The well-known stick and leaf insects from the same rich neighbourhood in like manner exactly mimic the twigs and leaves of the forest among which they lurk: some of them look for all the world like little bits of walking bamboo, while others appear in all varieties of hue, as if opening buds and full-blown leaves and pieces of yellow foliage sprinkled with the tints and moulds of decay had of a sudden raised themselves erect upon six legs, and begun incontinently to perambulate the Malayan woodlands like vegetable Frankensteins in all their glory. The larva of one such deceptive insect, observed in Nicaragua by sharp-eyed Mr. Belt, appeared at first sight like a mere fragment of the moss on which it rested, its body being all prolonged into little thread-like green filaments, precisely imitating the foliage around it. Once more, there are common flies which secure protection for themselves by growing into the counterfeit presentment of wasps or hornets, and so obtaining immunity from the attacks of birds or animals. Many of these curiously mimetic insects are banded with yellow and black in the very image of their stinging originals, and have their tails sharpened, in terrorem, into a pretended sting, to give point and verisimilitude to the deceptive resemblance. More curious still, certain South American butterflies of a perfectly inoffensive and edible family mimic in every spot and line of colour sundry other butterflies of an utterly unrelated and fundamentally dissimilar type, but of so disagreeable a taste as never to be eaten by birds or lizards. The origin of these curious resemblances I shall endeavour to explain (after Messrs. Bates and Wallace) a littl