COLORATION 115 



pened, there were lions and leopards in such a tract, it was 

 difficult to see or find the former, and far more difficult to 

 see or find the latter, because both species were always 

 slouching and crawling, or lying down in some thicket or 

 tall bunch of grass; and either one of them when it first 

 saw danger, if it thought itself unobserved, promptly 

 crouched and lay motionless or else slunk rapidly and 

 stealthily off below the level of the grass tops. Neither the 

 lion's nor the leopard's coloration was in any degree more 

 concealing than the coloration of some or most of the grass- 

 eaters; if the big cats had been mounted on higher legs and 

 had possessed the habits of the grass-eaters, their coats 

 would have shown no more concealing quality than the coats 

 of the hartebeest, eland, and oryx. Habit, and especially 

 the ability to take advantage of cover, were the vital factors, 

 the survival factors, in securing concealment; the exact 

 shade or pattern of the coat was a wholly negligible factor. 

 The case of the puma is very instructive in this regard. 

 It is as plentiful as the jaguar in the great tropical forests, 

 and is found in many great temperate forests which the 

 jaguar never reaches. Mr. Thayer gives an ingenious pic- 

 ture to show how the jaguar's spotted hide absolutely con- 

 ceals him among the foliage (not natural foliage, but foliage 

 put in by Mr. Thayer to prove his point), and points out 

 that if it were unicolored the animal would be revealed; 

 he forgets that the puma, equally common in exactly the 

 same surroundings, is unicolored and is not revealed. Now, 

 our experience, in accord with the experience of most hunt- 

 ers and out-of-door naturalists, is that the cougar is, of all 

 American big animals, the most difficult to see and the 

 most rarely seen. Its neutral-tinted, nearly unicolored. 



