grow around it.  Finally the larva of the elephant hawk-moth, which grows to a very large size, has a pair of huge spots that seem like great eyes; and direct experiment establishes the fact that small birds mistake it for a young snake, and stand in terrible awe of it accordingly, though it is in reality a perfectly harmless insect, and also, as I am credibly informed (for I cannot speak upon the point from personal experience), a very tasty and well-flavoured insect, and ‘quite good to eat’ too, says an eminent authority.  One of these big snake-like caterpillars once frightened Mr. Bates himself on the banks of the Amazon.

Now, I know that cantankerous person, the universal objector, has all along been bursting to interrupt me and declare that he himself frequently finds no end of caterpillars, and has not the slightest difficulty at all in distinguishing them with the naked eye from the leaves and plants among which they are lurking.  But observe how promptly we crush and demolish this very inconvenient and disconcerting critic.  The caterpillars he finds are almost all hairy ones, very conspicuous and easy to discover—­’woolly bears,’ and such like common and unclean creatures—­and the reason they take no pains to conceal themselves from his unobservant eyes is simply this:  nobody on earth wants to discover them.  For either they are protectively encased in horrid hairs, which get down your throat and choke you and bother you (I speak as a bird, from the point of view of a confirmed caterpillar eater), or else they are bitter and nasty to the taste, like the larva of the spurge moth and the machaon butterfly.  These are the ordinary brown and red and banded caterpillars that the critical objector finds in hundreds on his peregrinations about his own garden—­commonplace things which the experienced naturalist has long since got utterly tired of.  But has your rash objector ever lighted upon that rare larva which lives among the periwinkles, and exactly imitates a periwinkle petal?  Has he ever discovered those deceptive creatures which pretend for all the world to be leaves of lady’s-bedstraw, or dress themselves up as flowers of buttonweed?  Has he ever hit upon those immoral caterpillars which wriggle through life upon the false pretence that they are only the shadows of projecting ribs on the under surface of a full-grown lime leaf?  No, not he; he passes them all by without one single glance of recognition; and when the painstaking naturalist who has hunted them every one down with lens and butterfly net ventures tentatively to describe their personal appearance, he comes up smiling with his great russet woolly bear comfortably nestling upon a green cabbage leaf, and asks you in a voice of triumphant demonstration, where is the trace of concealment or disguise in that amiable but very inedible insect?  Go to, Sir Critic, I will have none of you; I only use you for a metaphorical marionette to set up and knock down again, as Mr. Punch in the street show knocks down the policeman who comes to arrest him, and the grimy black personage of sulphurous antecedents who pops up with a fizz through the floor of his apartment.