MIMICRY AND PROTECTIVE RESEMBLANCE. 713 



direction as when accountiiiu' for the assiiinption by animals of the color 

 of their surronndings. Rotii are produced in the same way and h.we the 

 same cause and end. It is only by keeping in view this tolerably ol)vious 

 truth that we can explain all the freaks of mimicry. "The specific, 

 mimetic analogies," says Bates, "are adaptations — phenomena of precisely 

 the same nature as those in which insects . . . are assimilated in superfi- 

 cial appearance to the vegetable or inorganic substance on which or amongst 

 which they live." 



To gain an idea, then, of the processes by which the "staggering" 

 examples of mimicry are produced, we must look first at the simplest 

 forms of protective resemblance. Go to the sea-shore and observe the 

 grasshoppers among the beach grass. They fly up at your approach, 

 whizz off a rod or so and alight. Can you see them ? They are colored 

 so nearly like the sands they live upon that detection of one at rest is 

 almost impossible. On yonder grassy bluff, a stone's throw away, you 

 will find none of them, but other kinds equally or almost equally lost to 

 sight by their harmony with theh^ surroundings. What chance of life to 

 either if they suddenly changed places? They would be so conspicuous 

 that every passing bird or other insectivorous creature would sight them. 

 These protective colors have of course been gained by slow steps. Every 

 grasshopper that found its preferred food among the sands was liable to be 

 eaten. In the long run just those would be eaten which were most easily 

 seen ; one which varied in coloring to never so small a degree so as to be 

 less easily seen than his brother would live to perpetuate his kind, and his 

 brother come to an untimely end ; the progeny would show the fortunate 

 variation aiuong others and be the more probably spared to transmit in 

 increased volume the probability of the happy coloring. Given, then, a 

 brood of grasshoppers that find their preferred food in sandy spots, and 

 unless other and more powerful forces act upon them, it muf^t result from 

 their liability to be eaten by creatures fond of grasshoppers that in time 

 they will resemble in coloring the sand on which they live ; it is impossi- 

 ble that they should not. Any creature not specially protected by nau- 

 seousness or habit or special device of some sort luust in the very nature 

 of things, if it is to live at all, have some other protection, and that 

 afforded by color and pattern is by far the most common. The world is 

 made up of eaters and eaten, of devices to catch and devices to avoid beiuij 

 caught. In his Light of Asia, Arnold thus makes Buddha contemplate 

 the scene : — 



Tiien marked he, too, 

 How lizard fed on ant, and snake on him. 

 And kite on both ; and how the fish-hawk robbed 

 The fish-tiger of that which it had seized ; 

 The shrike chasing the Indbul, which did hunt 

 The jewelled butterflies ; till e^'ery^^■here 



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