448 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
other, they were aware of a vertebrate world not sharing human 
abilities in lesser degree, but brutish in the pejorative sense; reflex; 
qualitatively different. 
Our hunting fathers told the story 
Of the sadness of the creatures 
Pitied the limits and the lack 
Set in their finished features .. 
The 20th-century biologist surveyed the white rat im its aseptic 
cage, solving with deplorable sloth problems barely related to any 
that it would be likely to encounter in its own unhygienic habitat, 
glanced with discomfort at the baroque elaboration of natural forms, 
and proposed, with a conviction which in the worst cases was soon 
to become hysterical, a series of wholly implausible alternative ex- 
planations. With these, we need not be concerned here; it is enough 
to note that they ranged from flat denial of the evidence, to asser- 
tions that coincidence alone needed to be invoked as a sufficient 
explanation of it. 
The renaissance of protective-coloration theory has to a great extent 
followed the Second World War. The original accounts of tropical 
insects from which it was derived came from experienced field nat- 
uralists, such as Bates, Hudson, and Belt. And, again, its redis- 
covery came very largely from the European group of ethologists, 
also, basically, field naturalists, who were stimulated by accounts of 
experimental work on cryptic coloration started between the wars, 
and admirably summarized in a now classic work by the Cambridge 
zoologist H. B. Cott (1940). 
The major problems with which they had to deal may be easily 
set forth: First of all, faith in the efficiency of selection pressures 
had to be restored. Secondly, the behavior of predators needed to 
be so analyzed as to reveal the manner in which the selection pressures 
created by them must operate. Lastly, the genetic material upon 
which selection must act and its potentiality for variation had to be 
related to the findings of the behavior studies. These various lines 
of approach and some of the findings have been described by 
Tinbergen (1958). 
My own connection with these studies began in 1958, when, under 
the supervision of Dr. N. Tinbergen at Oxford, a program of work 
was started on the functions of the eyespot patterns of insects. The 
outcome of this research was a demonstration that the eyelike patterns 
on the wings of many butterflies do, in fact, serve to scare away avian 
predators, and that the selective advantages which they confer are of 
a high order (Blest, 1956, 19572). At this stage in the investigation 
a further problem was presented; there are groups of insects some 
1W.H. Auden, Collected shorter poems. London, 1950. 
