492 Allen, The Concealing Coloration Question. [oct. 



Having tried to show why Mr. Thayer should be accorded a 

 considerate hearing, I will now attempt to show why Colonel 

 Roosevelt, with all his wide field experience, is not a safe guide to 

 follow implicitly. I adopt this method of approach because I 

 fear that Roosevelt's paper, following that of Barbour and Phillips, 

 has had a reactionary influence out of proportion to its importance, 

 and I am led to believe that it has not been examined very criti- 

 cally. 



I have detected in Roosevelt's paper and the reply to Thayer's 

 criticisms appended thereto upwards of fifty instances of mis- 

 quotations, misrepresentations, and perversions of Thayer's state- 

 ments and pieces of faulty reasoning in matters of detail, while 

 the paper is full of dogmatic utterances which must be just as 

 offensive to fair-minded readers as any of Thayer's unguarded 

 overstatements — • and more so. A few specimens will be sufficient, 

 I think, to show Roosevelt's inaccurate habit of mind and slap- 

 dash style of thinking. In two places (in the footnote on page 156 

 and on page 220) he instances the photographs of certain birds 

 taken by Messrs. Job, Finley, and Chapman as showing the 

 conspicuousness of those species in a state of nature, quite over- 

 looking the obvious facts that the photographers naturally chose 

 the conspicuous subjects, avoiding those that were at all obscured 

 and getting their cameras into positions where the birds would 

 come out most clearly, and thus made the birds as conspicuous as 

 they possibly could, which was the end and aim of their work. 

 I take it that the birds in most photographs do not appear at all as 

 they would under average conditions in their natural surroundings. 

 Then, on page 162 we are told that the Seissor-tailed Fl^-catcher is 

 conspicuous in shape, but we are not informed how a bird can be 

 conspicuous in shape. I suppose if a row of Kingbirds were pinned 

 against a white screen and a Seissor-tailed Flycatcher were placed 

 in the middle of the row, the latter bird would be made conspicu- 

 ous by its shape, but how could it be so in its natural surroundings? 

 It is evident that by 'conspicuous' Roosevelt here means unusual, 

 remarkable, but the words are by no means synonymous. I shall 

 have something to say later on this confusion of ideas that tends 

 to call an unusual or brightly colored object conspicuous. As to 

 the Scissor-tail, Roosevelt goes on to say that it is conspicuous 



