At page 205 of the first volume of this work, I have described a butterfly which, when at rest, so closely resembles a dead leaf, that it thereby escape the attacks of its enemies.

This is termed a "protective resemblance." If however the butterfly, being itself savoury morsel to birds, had closely resembled another butterfly which was disagreeable to birds, and therefore never eaten by them, it would be as well protected as if it resembled a leaf; and this is what has been happily termed "mimicry" by Mr.Bates, who first discovered the object of these curious external imitations of one insect by another belonging to a distinct genus or family, and sometimes even to a distinct order.

The clear-winged moth which resemble wasps and hornets are the best examples of "mimicry" in our own country.
For a long time all the known cases of exact resemblance of one creature to quite a different one were confined to insects, and it was therefore with great pleasure that I discovered in the island of Bouru two birds which I constantly mistook for each other, and which yet belonged to two distinct and somewhat distant families.

One of these is a honeysucker named Tropidorhynchus bouruensis, and the other a kind of oriole, which has been called Mimeta bouruensis.

The oriole resembles the honeysucker in the following particulars: the upper and under surfaces of the two birds are exactly of the same tints of dark and light brown; the Tropidorhynchus has a large bare black patch round the eyes; this is copied in the Mimeta by a patch of black feathers.