The Woodhewer Family. 249 
brown hue being of a shade that assimilates very 
closely to the surroundings. There are pale 
yellowish browns, lined and mottled, in species 
living amidst a sere, scanty vegetation; earthy 
browns, in those frequenting open sterile or stony 
places; while the species that creep on trees in 
forests are dark brown in colour, and in many cases 
the feathers are mottled in such a manner as to 
make them curiously resemble the bark of a tree. 
The genera Lochmias and Sclerurus are the darkest, 
the plumage in these birds being nearly or quite 
black, washed or tinged with rhubarb yellow. Their 
black plumage would render them conspicuous in 
the sunshine, but they pass their lives in dense 
tropical forests, where the sun at noon sheds only 
a gloomy twilight. 
If “colour is ever tending to increase and to 
appear where it is absent,” as Dr. Wallace believes, 
then we ought to find it varying in the direction of 
greater brightness in some species in a family so 
numerous and variable as the Dendrocolaptide, 
however feeble and in need of a protective colour- 
ing these birds may be in a majority of cases. And 
this in effect we do find. In many of the dark- 
plumaged species that live in perpetual shade some 
parts are a very bright chestnut; while in a few 
that live in such close concealment as to be almost 
independent of protective colouring, the lower 
plumage has become pure white. A large number 
of species have a bright or nearly bright gular spot. 
This is most remarkable in Synallaxis phryganophila, 
the chin being sulphur-yellow, beneath which is a 
spot of velvet-black, and on either side a white 
