Origin of Species Variorum

→ the principle of natural 1866

natural 1869 1872

→ has recently 1866 1869

and Trimen have likewise 1872

→ other cases could be given with other orders of 1866

other instances could be given with other orders of 1869

Africa, and with some other 1872

→ instance of mimicry amongst 1866

case of mimicry amongst 1869

such case with 1872

→ no such cases 1866 1869

none 1872

→ that 1866 1869

furnished with a 1872

→ hence 1866 1869

which prey on them; hence 1872

→ has hitherto been 1866

is as yet 1869

of escaping destruction from

predaceous

predacious

birds and insects, and

was

consequently oftener preserved;— "the less perfect degrees of resemblance being generation after generation eliminated, and only the others left to propagate their kind." So that here we have an excellent illustration of →the principle of natural selection.

Messrs.

Mr.

Wallace →has recently described several equally striking cases of

imitation

mimicry

in the Lepidoptera of the Malay

Archipelago

Archipelago,

and →other cases could be given with other orders of insects. Mr. Wallace has also

described

detected

given

one →instance of mimicry amongst birds, but we have →no such cases with the larger

quadrupeds.

animals.

The much greater frequency of

mimicry

imitation

mockery

with insects than with other animals, is probably the consequence of their small size; insects cannot defend themselves, excepting indeed the kinds →that sting, and I have never heard of an instance of

such kinds

these

mocking other insects, though they are

mocked;

mocked:

insects cannot

easily escape

escape

by flight from the larger

animals

animals;

→hence they are reduced, like most weak creatures, to trickery and dissimulation.

But to return to more ordinary cases of analogical resemblance: as members of distinct classes have often been adapted by successive slight modifications to live under nearly similar circumstances,— to inhabit, for instance, the three elements of land, air, and water,— we can perhaps understand how it is that a numerical parallelism has sometimes been observed between the

subgroups

sub-groups

in distinct classes. A naturalist, struck by a parallelism of this nature in any one class, by arbitrarily raising or sinking the value of the groups in other classes (and all our experience shows that

their

this

valuation →has hitherto been arbitrary), could easily extend the parallelism over a wide range; and thus the septenary, quinary, quaternary, and ternary classifications have probably arisen.