Protective Coloration in its relation to Mimicry, etc. 555 



conspicuous. I once saw a skunk {Mephitis americmms) 

 crossing a snow-field near at hand. This animal is black 

 (with the slight amount of effacive gradation found even 

 in black animals), with a large white pattern on top. 

 He was totally unrecognizable, because his white against 

 the snow was undistinguishable. His black was left to 

 form a most grotesque silhouette. Had he been against 

 black, it would have been this black part that disap- 

 peared, and one would have seen only an unrecognizable, 

 moving white thing. Naturalists' lack of understanding 

 this principle's immense import has gone far to strengthen 

 the present Mimicry and Warning- Colour theories, which 

 may prove to have been evolved, largely, in the effort 

 to explain supposed conspicuousness, where such did not 

 exist. A tiger in the desert sands, though his gradation 

 would still, more or less, efiace his solidity, would never- 

 theless show his i^rt^j^cm. His bamboo-vistas would be 

 plainly a failure ngainst the sand. The lion in the bamboos 

 would, when not covered by them, tend to present an unac- 

 countable /laf silhouette, — a lion-shaped section of desert- 

 landscape, out of place. On the same principle, a white 

 patch on striped cloth or a striped patch on white cloth 

 would be conspicuous. We see on all hands evidence that 

 Nature cannot help moving forward to the utmost com- 

 pleteness of protective devices ; — that, in fact, she cannot 

 grope or blunder. A marvellous, turquoise, emerald-green 

 and red-coral-raarked Mediterranean fish looks conspicuous 

 on the fishmonger's slab; but follow him to the sun-lit 

 ocean grottos which he inhabits, and of which he is a 

 wonderful picture ! No, the whole use of the word con- 

 spicuous is mainly born of the zoologist's lacking the 

 artist's sight. 



Let us now turn to the field in which the naturalists 

 are most conspicuously at fault, that of the butterflies and 

 moths. One glance of an artist, — that is, of an artist 

 accustomed to lifelong looking at vegetation and butterfly- 

 life, — at a world's collection of butterflies, shows him that 

 they are mainly either flying pictures of various com- 

 binations of flowers and their backgrounds, pictures of the 

 shccflouj under foliage, with delicate patterns of vegetation 

 or flowers drawn across it, as, for instance, in the North 

 American Peqyilo polydcimas, and the dark Satyrina\ — or 

 that they are wonderful representations of flowers them- 

 selves, as in the Pierinai (all but their usually narrow dark 



