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A compact plant from Brazil, worth growing for its bright green, leaf-like stems. It should be grown in pots, in stove temperature, and encouraged to form a globose bush. Mag. 4039. A tiny plant, similar in habit to R. penduliflora, but with brown branches, the small joints angled, and bearing silky hairs. The branches and joints are set at zigzag angles.

When very young it has broader leaves, but in the adult rosettes the leaves become very narrow, but fleshy and of a bright green color. They are so crowded as to leave no space between them unoccupied. The flowering spikes of the second year bear long leaf-like bracts under the first few flowers, but those arising later are much shorter.

They leave the navel uncovered; to conceal it would be immodest. The men are naked save the gee-string, unless a leglet of brass wire under the knee be regarded as a garment; the bodies of many of them are tattooed in a leaf-like pattern. A few men had the native blanket hanging from their shoulders, but leaving the body bare in front. The prevailing color is blue; at Campote it is red.

To take only one example this, however, from Gothic art, which naturally yields the most remarkable what exquisite poetry in the name of 'the rose window' or better still, 'the rose, given to the rich circular aperture of stained glass, with its leaf-like compartments, in the transepts of a Gothic cathedral!

All these facts, and especially the frequently recurring retrogression of the leaf-like appearance, justify serious doubt regarding the Darwinian assumption, that adaptation was a necessity for the forest-butterflies on account of the protection which it provided.

The leaf-like form is generally associated with the dark, faded colors of dry leaves, and when this similarity disappears even bright colors appear on the fore-wings. In many cases the resemblance to leaves is very imperfect; different forms of the same species live side by side and among them are to be found those, the resemblance of which to leaves is extremely slight.

Clodd, remarking upon this fact, adds: "Thus, then, is explained the tawny color of the larger animals that inhabit the desert; the stripes upon the tiger, which parallel with the vertical stems of bamboo, conceal him as he stealthily nears his prey; the brilliant green of tropical birds; the leaf-like form and colors of certain insects; the dried, twig-like form of many caterpillars; the bark-like appearance of tree-frogs; the harmony of the ptarmigan's summer plumage with the lichen-colored stones upon which it sits; the dusky color of creatures that haunt the night; the bluish transparency of animals which live on the surface of the sea; the gravel-like color of flat-fish that live at the bottom; and the gorgeous tints of those that swim among the coral reefs."

Moreover, the hermit told them that these vampire bats have very sharp, carnivorous teeth, besides a tongue which is furnished with the curious organs by which they suck the life-blood of their fellow-creatures; that they have a peculiar, leaf-like, overhanging lip; and that he had a stuffed specimen of a bat that measured no less than two feet across the expanded wings, from tip to tip,

The upper part is clothed with the curved, leaf-like tubercles, from 3 in. to 6 in. long, grey-green in colour, succulent, with a tough skin, triangular, and gradually narrowed to a blunt point, upon which are half a dozen or more thin, flexuous, horny filaments, neither spines nor hairs in appearance, but almost hay-like; the central one is about 5 in. long, and the others about half that length.

Now, just in proportion as the beetles and flies grow still more cautious, even the green lizards themselves fail to pick up a satisfactory livelihood; and so at last we get that most remarkable Nicaraguan form, decked all round with leaf-like expansions, and looking so like the foliage on which it rests that no beetle on earth can possibly detect it.