XI 
THE SPECIAL COLOURS OF PLANTS 
335 
colour sense on the animal integuments. 1 He argues that the 
colours of insects and birds reproduce generally the colours of 
the flowers they frequent or the fruits they eat, and he 
adduces numerous cases in which flower-haunting insects and 
fruit-eating birds are gaily coloured. This he supposes to be 
due to the colour-taste, developed by the constant presence 
of bright flowers and fruits, being applied to the selection of 
each variation towards brilliancy in their mates; thus in time 
producing the gorgeous and varied hues they now possess. 
Mr. Allen maintains that “ insects are bright where bright 
flowers exist in numbers, and dull where flowers are rare or 
inconspicuous ; ” and he urges that “ we can hardly explain this 
wide coincidence otherwise than by supposing that a taste 
for colour is produced through the constant search for food 
among entomophilous blossoms, and that this taste has reacted 
upon its possessors through the action of unconscious sexual 
selection.” 
The examples Mr. Allen quotes of bright insects being 
associated with bright flowers seem very forcible, but are 
really deceptive or erroneous ; and quite as many cases could 
be quoted which prove the very opposite. For example, in 
the dense equatorial forests flowers are exceedingly scarce, 
and there is no comparison with the amount of floral colour 
to be met with in our temperate meadows, woods, and hill¬ 
sides. The forests about Para in the lower Amazon are 
typical in this respect, yet they abound with the most 
gorgeously coloured butterflies, almost all of which frequent 
the forest depths, keeping near the ground, where there is the 
greatest deficiency of brilliant flowers. In contrast with this 
let us take the Cape of Good Hope—the most flowery region 
probably that exists upon the globe,—where the country 
is a complete flower-garden of heaths, pelargoniums, mesembry- 
anthemus, exquisite iridaceous and other bulbs, and numerous 
flowering shrubs and trees ; yet the Cape butterflies are hardly 
equal, either in number or variety, to those of any country 
in South Europe, and are utterly insignificant when compared 
with those of the comparatively flowerless forest-depths of 
the Amazon or of New Guinea. Neither is there any relation 
between the colours of other insects and their haunts. Few 
1 The Colour Sense, chap. ix. 
