Explore "Tropical Africa" by Henry Drummond on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS.
Mimicry is imposture in nature. Carlyle in his blackest visions of "shams and humbugs" among human kind never saw anything so finished in hypocrisy as the naturalist now finds in every tropical forest. There are to be seen creatures, not singly, but in tens of thousands, whose very appearance, down to the minutest spot and wrinkle, is an affront to truth, whose every attitude is a pose for a purpose, and whose whole life is a sustained lie. Before these masterpieces of deception the most ingenious of human impositions are vulgar and transparent. Fraud is not only the great rule of life in a tropical forest, but the one condition of it.