70 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



of his assertion. At a meeting of the American Ornitholo- 

 gists' Union in Washington, as he relates, he showed to forty- 

 naturalists "a small, stuffed deer (a South American species) 

 that wore from its dorsal line down its sides two white 

 stripes in imitation of those of certain African antelopes." 

 He states that at ten yards' distance these (artificial) stripes 

 rendered the deer invisible to the "forty naturalists," but 

 that when they were removed and the deer left colored as 

 it actually was colored by nature it became clearly visible. 

 Apparently neither Mr. Thayer nor any one of the "forty 

 naturalists" was struck by the sufficiently obvious fact that, 

 according to his own account, he proved that the actual color- 

 ation of the deer was not concealing, and that it had to be con- 

 cealed by artificially giving it a coloration it did not in nature 

 possess. He showed, therefore, that nature did not give 

 the deer a concealing coloration, and that Mr. Thayer him- 

 self had to step in to supply the omission. In other words, 

 he proved that natural selection had not been "simple and 

 omnipotent," and that concealing coloration was not a sur- 

 vival factor; that, if it played any part in protecting the 

 deer, it was a minor part as compared to other factors, such 

 as habit and cover. Now, only one in ten of the species 

 of African antelope has stripes; very few have spots. 

 No antelope outside of Africa is striped. None of the deer 

 have stripes, and very few, when adult, have spots. The 

 small ruminants, such as the one to which Mr. Thayer 

 thoughtfully gave the concealing coloration it lacked, in- 

 clude the South American brockets, the Asiatic muntjacs, 

 and other little deer, and antelopes hke the duikers, dikdiks 

 and reedbucks. All of these are unstriped. 



Mr. Thayer's experiment, therefore, proves, so far as it 



