COLORATION 125 



thick forests of the temperate and torrid zones. The 

 jaguar is spotted; but the other big cat of the same region, 

 the puma, and the big dogs, and all the big animals upon 

 which they prey — the tapirs, peccaries, and deer — are prac- 

 tically monochrome, and many of them are not counter- 

 shaded. The tiger, leopard, and axis, which are striped or 

 spotted, are far outnumbered by the monochrome or prac- 

 tically monochrome lions, dholes, wolves, boars, deer, ante- 

 lopes, and oxen of the same forests and jungles. There is 

 one pied tapir; there are several monochrome tapirs. The 

 wild oxen are practically monochrome, except for one or 

 two species which have an advertising white rump; nine- 

 tenths of the species are monochrome. In Africa the same 

 tendencies are manifest. The nearly monochrome or nearly 

 unicolored species of the forest, the jungle, and the reed 

 beds much outnumber the species which are appreciably 

 spotted or striped, and among these the tendency evidently 

 is for the spots or stripes to disappear; the elands, evidently 

 descended from a highly striped type, have in some forms 

 almost or completely lost their stripes, and the same is true 

 of the bushbucks. In the arctogaeal forests, boreal and 

 temperate, the elimination of the patterned types has gone 

 much further. The conclusion seems inevitable that the 

 patterned types in the world of to-day have no survival 

 value, and that their coloration at present (using "present'* 

 in a geologic sense) confers no benefit upon these spotted 

 and striped animals when compared with the monochrome 

 or nearly unicolor animals, whether these latter are or are 

 not countershaded. 



This statement about present-day conditions does not 

 justify us in dogmatizing about conditions in the immemorial 



