an extraordinary degree, and their confidence in their own invisibility is unlimited. A practical illustration of this occurred to me one evening when I had sat in one place for twenty minutes carefully spying the surrounding country. My coign of vantage was a knoll which commanded a small shallow hollow, in which there was not a vestige of cover, except the few thin thuja bushes which looked as if they could not hide a Rat. It was not till I rose to shift my position that a female Aroui and two yearlings started from these bushes. They had been lying within sixty yards of me, and must have been fully conscious of my presence."[1] Le Vaillant writes: "If the Giraffe stands still, and you view it in front, the effect is very different. As the fore part of its body is much larger than the hind part, it completely conceals the latter; so that the animal resembles the standing trunk of a dead tree."[2] Mr. Baines, the African traveller, related to Frank Buckland that "the Giraffe seems to know that if he keeps perfectly quiet he will be mistaken for a tree; if he moves, his presence will become apparent to his enemy—man."[3] Baines himself has recorded that a Giraffe he watched passing through the bush looked "for all the world, as he stopped to gaze, like the white stump of a dead tree, which anyone might have passed by without suspecting it of the power of motion."[4] Sir Samuel Baker bears the same witness: "It may be readily imagined that, owing to the great height of this animal, it can be distinguished from a distance, and does not require an elaborate search; nevertheless, it is exceedingly deceptive in appearance when found among its native forests. The red-barked mimosa, which is its favourite food, seldom grows higher than fourteen or fifteen feet. Many woods are almost entirely composed of these trees, upon the flat heads of which the Giraffe can feed when looking downwards. I have frequently been mistaken when remarking some particular dead tree-stem at a distance, that appeared like a decayed relic of the forest, until, upon nearer approach, I have been struck by the peculiar inclination of the trunk: suddenly it has started into movement and disappeared."[5] Gordon Cumming narrates
