COLORATION 133 



bobcats, foxes, minks, and weasels look at rabbits, wood- 

 chucks, gophers, and mice. The animals observed were 

 sufficiently numerous in species and individuals — of some 

 we must, all told, have seen many thousands under every 

 conceivable circumstance and surrounding — to give some 

 warrant in generalizing about them. We have touched 

 above on the coloration characters of some of them; the 

 characters of those omitted are similar and teach iden- 

 tically the same lessons. 



Among these animals a fair proportion are not merely 

 not concealingly colored, but have a strikingly advertising 

 or revealing coloration. The prongbuck, white goat, black 

 bear, the wolf when either in the white or the black coat, 

 the giraffes, zebras, sable antelope, wildebeest, topi, white- 

 eared kob, and white-withered lechwi are so colored that 

 unless screened by cover it is almost impossible for them 

 to avoid attracting attention under normal conditions. 

 Many of the other animals, although not so glaringly con- 

 spicuous, nevertheless possess a coloration sufficiently con- 

 spicuous to insure their being seen by any brute or human 

 foe that trusts to eyesight at all — for instance, the pallah, 

 bongo, bushbuck, white-tail deer, and all the plains antelopes 

 of Africa — not one of which, from the eland, roan, and oryx 

 to the gazelles, ever tries to escape observation or lives 

 under conditions which would enable it to escape observa- 

 tion. There remains a minority of the grass-eating ani- 

 mals, which live in forests or swamps, whose coloration, if 

 not exactly concealing, is at least not conspicuous. These, 

 however, do not seem to be any better able to shift for 

 themselves than such of their neighbors as happen to be 

 advertisingly colored; the little antelopes that are foxy-red 



