In consequence, it is almost impossible to wet a butterfly’s wing with water. The insect may be plunged beneath the surface, and the long hairs of the body will be soaked and cling together in a very miserable fashion. But the water rolls off the wings like rain off a slated roof, and even if a few drops remain on the surface, they can be shaken off, and the wing will be perfectly dry.
Mostly these scales are flat, but sometimes they are curved. I have among my microscopic objects a piece of wing from a South American butterfly, the scales of which are oblong and bent, just like the curved tiles shown in the second right-hand figure of the illustration. These beautiful scales are deep azure or warm brown, according to the direction of the light.
Perhaps my readers may call to mind that some architects dislike the flat, square form in which slates are usually put on roofs, and try to make them less formal.
Sometimes they take their square slates, and fit them with one of the angles uppermost, so that each slate looks something like the ace of diamonds in a pack of cards. Sometimes they are still more ambitious, and certainly succeed in producing a better effect, by cutting the slates in hexagons instead of squares, and fixing them as shown in the right-hand figure of the illustration. Putting aside the familiar hexagons of the honeycomb, and the apparent hexagons of an insect’s compound eye, we have in the common Tortoise an example of hexagonal plates that exactly resembles the slate roofing.
In the next illustration we have a variety of the same principle exhibited in differently shaped tiles and scales. The figures on the right hand show the pointed, the square, and the oblong tiles. These also would answer very well as representations of different forms of scale armour, the one being intended to throw off rain, and the other to repel weapons.
On the other side of the illustration are examples taken from the animal kingdom. First comes the Bajjerkeit, or Short-tailed Manis, which has already been mentioned, and whose imbricated scales will resist the blows of any spear or sword. As to my own specimen, when it is struck, it resounds as if it were a solid plate of metal, and I should think that during the lifetime of the animal a reasonably strong axe would not easily make its way through that coat of mail.
Below the Manis are a pair of fish, whose scales, though not so strong as those of the mammal, yet are arranged in the same manner, and answer the same purpose. The last figure represents three scale-bands of the Armadillo, an animal which has already been mentioned. I may as well state here that in several anthropological museums there are various portions of defensive armour made from the scale-clad skin of the Crocodile, Manis, and similar animals.
