72 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



big game is very ancient and of long standing and is often 

 more constant than the osteological and horn characters 

 upon which the genera are usually based. Such fixity must 

 have been produced by color inheritance through countless 

 generations. Present environment, therefore, acts very 

 slowly, if at all, on the color scheme; its only appreciable 

 effect being usually one of tone or shade on the colora- 

 tion generally, and this effect being probably due to the 

 inheritance of acquired characteristics rather than to natu- 

 ral selection. One of the strongest proofs of the long- 

 standing nature of color pattern is found in the young of 

 such striped game as zebra, koodoo, and bongo, which 

 show absolutely down to every minute detail the color pat- 

 tern of their parents. There is in these early stages no clew 

 to the remote ancestral coloration of the race, nor is there 

 moreover in the earliest foetal stages in which color is as- 

 sumed any change from the adult livery in essential pat- 

 tern. But the young of the unstriped eland and unspotted 

 and unstriped bushbuck do show traces of ancestral spots 

 and stripes. 



The other "experiment" of Mr. Thayer's to which I 

 wish to refer is that made with imitation oryx heads and 

 zebras. He wishes to show that its stripes protect the 

 zebra when it is among the reeds at a drinking-place; and 

 that the bold black and white markings on the head of 

 the oryx likewise "simulate reeds" at a drinking-place. 

 He contrasts each picture with a picture of the same ani- 

 mal, or animal's head, colored gray or brown and counter- 

 shaded in ordinary fashion. He points out with triumph 

 that (in his pictures of artificial animals) the whole zebra 

 in one case and the oryx head in the other are more diffi- 



