26 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



moment this relatively scant faculty is fatigued, and we fall back into 

 the hands of the old animal instinct, sensation-memory, which we share 

 with the horse and woodchuck, and we proceed to rattle off the list of 

 the hundreds of times we have seen one of these white patterns, the 

 skunk's or deer's (bright against the ground as man's height makes to 

 be the case). But these white tops are white evidently because con- 

 cealment from a lower level, for one purpose or another, is the thing 

 most important to the animals so patterned. 



Eoosevelt carried into Africa the regulation down-looker 's miscon- 

 ception of the subject. And nowhere on all his pages (or in fact on any 

 other man's pages) is to be found the faintest perception that all these 

 white patterns on zebras and antelopes were playing a diametrically 

 opposite part to the eyes of the creeping enemies of these plains-haunt- 

 ing animals. 



Colonel Eoosevelt, with the best intentions, was fated to put himself 

 on record in the most unfortunate of attacks on our book — an attack 

 which forces us, if we answer it at all, to expose its extraordinary weak- 

 nesses. It is the nearest to one hundred per cent, of error that I have 

 ever read, on any subject that I understood. 



First, he shows fatal ignorance of the laws of optics on which the 

 whole thing rests, and consequently absolutely misconceives what con- 

 cealing-coloration is or could be. Secondly, he does not see the joke 

 against all who try to prove that nothing has escaped their sight by 

 telling what they saw. He would be too sagacious to apply such reason- 

 ing to practical affiairs — why does he take science less seriously ? When 

 I announce to the world the discovery of an almost universal concealing- 

 power, wider certain conditions, in animals' costumes, what has it to do 

 with the case to tell of the animals one has seen ? Let us apply Eoose- 

 velt's method to some practical case. If the police announce the dis- 

 covery in the garret of some respected citizen of a complete counterfeit- 

 ing apparatus, with every sign of daily use, what does it avail to testify 

 that you have seen the citizen hundreds of times not counterfeiting? 

 The discovery of the evidence compels an investigation. If the owner 

 of a game preserve discovers in the cellar of some neighbor a supply of 

 freshly used game traps, what does it avail that this neighbor is daily 

 seen not trapping? Again only an investigation will do. What I have 

 discovered is that all these patterns of an animal's costume are potential 

 counterfeiters, of the most perfect kind, ready for action (action in 

 some cases almost constant, in others only at rare, but vital, moments) 

 — each one a most exquisite reproduction of some background typical 

 of the wearer's habitat. An artist is of course the judge of such copies ; 

 and it is therefore as an expert that I pronounce on them. 



No amount of reiterating that you have seen the poacher not poach- 

 ing, or the bank-note counterfeiter not counterfeiting, or this newly 



