ly 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.

Queerer still than the caterpillars which pretend to be leaves o