Vol. XVII 
1900 
THAYER, Banner Mark Theory. 109 
impart or explain the more instinctive half of their wood craft, 
any more than a man can tell you how he recognizes his wife or 
child a mile off. It is not necessarily by any detail that he does 
so, but by the effect of all the combined attributes of the distant 
figure. It is, as it were, by the chord struck in his brain by the 
sum of the personal notes revealed in the pose and action of 
the figure. 
When one reflects that even a human being, if he be a 
student of birds or quadrupeds, can grow to know a great many 
species so well as to recognize them when they are mere specks 
in the distance, precisely because each one’s every motion in 
flight or running is such as only that particular species could 
make, is it not absurd to doubt that creatures infinitely more 
dependent on such recognition must have developed a corre- 
sponding power, and out of all comparison beyond a man’s, and 
consequently have, as to recognition purposes, too little use for 
the small aid of these markings to keep them in their present 
high state of development? And while the accepted explanation 
of these markings seems so feeble, there is another so ample, 
that, to me at least, it takes possession of the field at a bound. 
It is Dr. C. Hart Merriam’s. His theory is that top and rear 
markings cooperate with protective gradation in a most strik- 
ing way for the preservation of the wearer when pursued. Since 
these bright patterns, such as the white stern and uplifted tail 
of deer or rabbit, or the white wing-and-tail-bars of many 
birds, establish, of course, a strong image on the pursuer’s 
retina, so that when, too closely pressed, the quarry, changes 
tactics, and taking to cover, closes suddenly his ‘ banner marks’ 
(which deer and hares do by dropping their tails and birds 
by folding wings and tail), he vanishes like magic from his 
enemy, who is left for just an essential moment staring 
wildly about to recover the sight of the bright pattern he was 
chasing, while its possessor is slipping off to still safer cover, 
enveloped ina cloud of invisibility more than doubled in power 
by its contrast to the previous conspicuousness. ‘This seems true 
of deer, hares, and in fact of most creatures that are the regular 
prey of others. Bay-winged Buntings, Robins, Mockingbirds, 
Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Towhees, Redstarts, and most War- 
