120 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



is also advertising. The young fawn, however, is spotted; 

 the spots are lost in the adult. In the fallow deer the spots 

 persist in the adult in its summer coat; and in the axis they 

 are permanent at all seasons. 



The view taken of these phenomena by some moderate 

 and sensible natural-selectionists and concealing-coloration- 

 ists, men whose judgment is generally sound, and whose 

 position must be treated with careful and respectful consid- 

 eration, is well put by Mr. Pycraft. He says, "The fallow 

 deer is a forest-haunting species," and during the summer 

 months lives "where the play of the sunlight through the 

 foliage scatters spots and shafts of golden light on every 

 side. Thus the spotted hides of the deer blend insensibly 

 with their surroundings." But in the fall the spots are lost 

 and the unicolored coat then "no less perfectly harmo- 

 nizes" with the dull landscape. "In the axis deer, also a 

 forest animal, the spotted coat is worn the year round, and 

 this because it is happy in living in regions where the 

 sombre pall of winter is never spread." Mr. Pycraft ex- 

 plains that the spotted (and striped) patterns are normal 

 for species which dwell amid the cover afforded by vegeta- 

 tion, where they form "a more or less perfect obliterative 

 coloration, causing the solid body to vanish, as it were, into 

 thin air," but "that so soon as these patterns fail to serve 

 any useful end — their purpose is to cut up the solid appear- 

 ance of the body and so destroy its contour, hence they are 

 called secant patterns — they begin to disintegrate," while 

 they are retained so long "as they confer benefits," their 

 "change of form" being "determined" by "that sumptuary 

 law which is part of the machinery of natural selection," for 

 the pattern degenerates when "the need for a spotted 



