XI 
THE SPECIAL COLOURS OF PLANTS 
333 
flowering creation subservient to his daily wants. His butter¬ 
cup, bis dandelion, and his meadow-sweet grow thick in every 
English field. His thyme clothes the hillside; his heather 
purples the bleak gray moorland. High up among the alpine 
heights his gentian spreads its lakes of blue; amid the snows 
of the Himalayas his rhododendrons gleam with crimson light. 
Even the wayside pond yields him the white crowfoot and the 
arrowhead, while the broad expanses of Brazilian streams are 
beautified by his gorgeous water-lilies. The insect has thus 
turned the whole surface of the earth into a boundless flower- 
garden, which supplies him from year to year with pollen or 
honey, and itself in turn gains perpetuation by the baits that 
it offers for his allurement.” 1 
Concluding Remarks on Colour in Nature. 
In the last four chapters I have endeavoured to give a 
general and systematic, though necessarily condensed view of 
the part which is played by colour in the organic world. We 
have seen in what infinitely varied ways the need of conceal¬ 
ment has led to the modification of animal colours, whether 
among polar snows or sandy deserts, in tropical forests or in 
the abysses of the ocean. We next find these general adapta¬ 
tions giving way to more specialised types of coloration, 
by which each species has become more and more harmonised 
with its immediate surroundings, till we reach the most 
curiously minute resemblances to natural objects in the leaf 
and stick insects, and those which are so like flowers or moss 
or birds’ droppings that they deceive the acutest eye. We 
have learnt, further, that these varied forms of protective 
colouring are far more numerous than has been usually sus¬ 
pected, because, what appear to be very conspicuous colours 
or markings when the species is observed in a museum or in 
a menagerie, are often highly protective when the creature is 
seen under the natural conditions of its existence. From 
these varied classes of facts it seems not improbable that 
fully one-half of the species in the animal kingdom possess 
colours which have been more or less adapted to secure for 
them concealment or protection. 
Passing onward we find the explanation of a distinct type 
1 The Colour Sense, by Grant Allen, p. 95. 
