COLORATION 99 



of the accidented landscape, the multitude of varying vistas, 

 interlaced and superimposed, and of every length and size, 

 make it well-nigh impossible for the eye of man or of beast 

 or bird of prey to pick out anything motionless. Unless 

 of strikingly conspicuous coloration, any animal that is mo- 

 tionless escapes notice. Hawk and owl and hunting man 

 are all alike — ever on the watch for movement; and this is 

 also true of the things that are hunted. This is why any 

 animal that "freezes" (as that keen observer, Mr. Seton, 

 calls it), from an elephant, or rhino, or buffalo to a grouse 

 or meadow-mouse or vireo, is so hard to make out. The 

 immobility and the cover and surroundings count for infi- 

 nitely more than the coloration. A first-class naturalist 

 and observer, Mr. Pyecraft, in his "Infancy of Animals," 

 speaks of the pattern of cover-haunting animals as "form- 

 ing a more or less perfect obliterative coloration, causing 

 the solid body to vanish, as it were, into thin air." In 

 reality it is the landscape, and not the coloration, which 

 thus obliterates the animal. The spotted, the striped, and 

 the unicolored animals are all obliterated in precisely the 

 same manner. The landscape, not the coloration, is the 

 obliterator in the great majority of cases. All that is de- 

 manded of the coloration in these cases is that it shall not 

 be of such a highly advertising type as, say, black or white 

 — and nature does not always insist even on this modest 

 requirement. 



The ultra natural-selection and concealing-coloration ex- 

 tremists, who treat concealing coloration as being of primary 

 importance to the welfare of the great majority of mam- 

 mals, including the big mammals, and as being almost uni- 

 versally present, should carefully study the big bovines. 



