124 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



coloration, while all the others, under practically similar 

 conditions of habitat and of enemies, have developed a 

 revealing type of coloration. We do not believe this inter- 

 pretation to be correct. What such facts really show, in 

 our judgment, is either that there has been a steady trend 

 away from a concealing and toward a revealing coloration, 

 or else that, as regards these forest and jungle dwellers, 

 habit and cover are of such overwhelming importance in the 

 lives of the creatures that the pattern of coloration ceases 

 to have any survival value, and is determined by some tend- 

 ency, or cause, or tissue of causation, entirely distinct from 

 the operation of natural selection to secure the survival of 

 the fittest by shielding them from the observation of their 

 foes. The same conclusion applies to the deer of the for- 

 est and jungle. Nineteen-twentieths of them are now 

 solid-colored. The tendency, evidently, is to lose the 

 spotted pattern, even where the environment is unchanged 

 so far as conditions telling for concealment are concerned; 

 which necessarily shows that this pattern does not possess 

 survival value. 



Thus all the facts tend to show the fundamental error 

 of the entire body of conclusions advanced by the natural- 

 selectionists as to the present survival value of the spotted, 

 striped, and pied patterns of coloration among forest-dwell- 

 ing animals. These are found much more frequently and 

 much better developed among the young than among the 

 adults; so that the tendency among the adults has evi- 

 dently been away from the patterned ancestral type. 

 Already the tendency has gone so far that the older pat- 

 terned types are far outnumbered by the monochrome 

 types among the bigger carnivores and grass-eaters in the 



