34 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Like John Burroughs in his Atlantic Monthly paper called " Gay 

 Plumes and Dull," Colonel Eoosevelt does not even take pains enough 

 with his data. Burroughs said : " Why does only one of our four 

 weasels turn white in winter?" The answer is that all of the four turn 

 white in winter ! Eoosevelt says : " Bears . . . have no white on them." 

 The fact is that seven species, without counting the two all-white kinds, 

 wear more or less white, especially in breast-crescents, collars, and fore- 

 shoulder stripes. 



About war-paints and appendages, too, I tell only optical, invin- 

 cible facts. On this subject I shall soon have more to say. 



The possibility of wonderful demonstrations of the effacing-power 

 even of stuffed skins of gorgeous or powerfully marked species such 

 as a peacock, or an oryx or zebra, is unfolding itself to me at a rate that 

 almost takes my breath away, and which can not fail to astonish all who 

 witness my experiments. 



Not yet understanding that this matter is unequivocally the artist's 

 business, Colonel Eoosevelt, like some of our other reviewers, proposes 

 a " scientific " tribunal for our book. Science means simply knowing. 

 What does science teach any scientific man more imperatively than 

 that he must employ specialists in every direction? Does astronomy 

 fit a man to practise medicine? Yet the astronomer and the doctor 

 are both men of science. Do naturalists imagine that the arts can 

 stand as they do, illuminating beacons through the ages, without hav- 

 ing adamantine, crystal truth at their core? The laws of color-cor- 

 relation are of course the very axis of the art of coloring, and any 

 intellectual painter inevitably is the scientist of all that is knowable 

 in this matter. While all painters perceive spontaneously that shadows 

 on the snow in a sunny open field have exactly the color of the ag- 

 gregate overhead sky, very few persons who are not artists can dis- 

 cover that they are more than " bluish." As our book's introduction 

 explains, a colorless mirror laid in such a snow-shadow and facing 

 upward reflects of course the overhead sky, and this reflection proves 

 absolutely to match the snow-shadow. This knowledge of the actual 

 color of things, and especially of transitory aspects, rests, then, wholly 

 with painters; and, if scio means I know, it is science. 



My critics say it is my theory that this or that bird's patterns pass 

 for the background; yet every time I show them this bird against 

 such a background, they either fail or nearly fail to detect it, and 

 invariably admit that it was its patterns' resemblance to background- 

 details that fooled them. Is it my theory that they are thus deceived ? 



Will not my critics wisely adjourn for the present the question of 

 the validity of any deductions I may have made, and contemplate 

 instead the array of actual facts? Whenever naturalists will take the 

 trouble to lie down on the ground beside a stuffed flamingo, or a live 



