Protective Coloration in its relation to Minviery, etc. 555 
conspicuous. I once saw a skunk (Mephitis americanus) 
crossing a snow-field near at hand. This animal is black 
(with the slight amount of effacive gradation found even 
in black animals), with a large white pattern on top. 
He was totally unrecognizable, because his white against 
the snow was undistinguishable. His black was left to 
form a most grotesque silhouette. Had he been against 
black, it would have been this black part that disap- 
peared, and one would have seen only an unrecognizable, 
moving white thing. Naturalists’ lack of understanding 
this principle’s immense import has gone far to strengthen 
the present Mimicry and Warning-Colour theories, which 
may prove to have been evolved, largely, in the effort 
to explain supposed conspicuousness, where such did not 
exist. A tiger in the desert sands, though his gradation 
would still, more or less, efface his solidity, would never- 
theless show his pattern. His bamboo-vistas would be 
plainly a failure against the sand. The lion in the bamboos 
would, when not covered by them, tend to present an unac- 
countable flat silhouette,—a lion-shaped section of desert- 
landscape, out of place. On the same principle, a white 
patch on striped cloth or a striped patch on white cloth 
would be conspicuous. We see on all hands evidence that 
Nature cannot help moving forward to the utmost com- 
pleteness of protective devices ;—that, in fact, she cannot 
grope or blunder. A marvellous, turquoise, emerald-green 
and red-coral-marked Mediterranean fish looks conspicuous 
on the fishmonger’s slab; but follow him to the sun-lit 
ocean grottos which he inhabits, and of which he is a 
wonderful picture! No, the whole use of the word con- 
spicuous is mainly born of the zoologist’s lacking the 
artist’s sight. 
Let us now turn to the field in which the naturalists 
are most conspicuously at fault, that of the butterflies and 
moths. One glance of an artist,—that is, of an artist 
accustomed to lifelong looking at vegetation and butterfly- 
life,—at a world’s collection of butterflies, shows him that 
they are mainly either flying pictures of various com- 
binations of flowers and their backgrounds, pictures of the 
shadow under foliage, with delicate patterns of vegetation 
or flowers drawn across it, as, for instance, in the North 
American Papilo polydamas, and the dark Satyrinx,—or 
that they are wonderful representations of flowers them- 
selves, as in the Pierine (all but their usually narrow dark 
