12 MOSTLY MAMMALS 



Be this as it may, we have no sort of difficulty in 

 realising why many desert-haunting animals have ex- 

 changed a striped or spotted coat for one of which the 

 colour is manifestly in harmony with the natural surround- 

 ings. Our real difficulties occur in the cases where animals 

 have a very similar kind of habitat, but display a total 

 difference in their type of coloration. Why, for instance, 

 have many kinds of deer — notably the Indian sambar and 

 its kindred— discarded their original spotted dress for one 

 of a sombre brown or red, while others, like the chital 

 (at all seasons) and the fallow-deer (in summer), have 

 retained the primitive dress ? Or why, again, are the 

 African bushbucks and kudus, which are as much forest 

 animals as the sambar, some of the most brilliantly 

 coloured of all hoofed animals ? If a variegated and 

 brilliantly coloured coat is essential to the well-being of 

 these animals, why is it not equally essential to the 

 sambar, or vice versa ? It is in regard to questions like 

 these that naturalists want help and assistance from 

 sportsmen and travellers, for at present they are working 

 to a great extent in the dark owing to lack of definite 

 and accurate observations in regard to the relation of 

 the colouring of these and other mammals to their 

 surroundings. 



In spite, however, of our ignorance of the reason why 

 some forest animals should be uniformly dark-coloured 

 while others are more or less brilliantly striped, the con- 

 clusion is being gradually forced upon us that in both cases 

 protection is the object. Apparently, as pointed out in the 

 sequel, the true explanation is that the spotted and striped 

 species inhabit bush, or the more open parts of the forest, 

 while dusky species like the sambar frequent dense thickets, 

 as, indeed. Sir Samuel Baker states, is the habit of the 



