° 1912 J Allen, The Concealing Coloration Question. 493 



" in color and in habits, has no concealing coloration, and never 

 conceals itself," and that "its long tail merely adds to its already 

 great conspicuousness." Though this is stated as a fact, no evi- 

 dence is given in support, and we must regard the statement 

 merely as the expression of an opinion, — an opinion which, in 

 view of its author's confusion of mind as to what constitutes con- 

 spicuousness, may be taken for what it is worth. One of the 

 most astonishing of Roosevelt's blunders is his failure to see that 

 white cannot possibly show light against a clear moonless night 

 sky. On page 176 he says that "even against the sky line" the 

 white rump of the prongbuck is "always advertising at night"; 

 and on page 179 he says that "at night white is not normally a 

 sky color, .... so that these white stern marks are not ' sky pattern 

 marks' at the very time when, according to his [Thayer's] theory, 

 they serve as such." Now the night sky, if not what we should 

 call white in the daylight, is yet the lightest thing to be seen on 

 a moonless night, and the deer's tail or the antelope's rump, not 

 being luminous in itself, cannot possibly be any lighter than the 

 sky which is the source of light. ^ White is white, of course, only 

 by virtue of its reflecting all the light that strikes it. It needs only 

 a little knowledge of the significance of colors and a little 'common 

 sense' to see that, but it is easy enough to prove it by experiment 

 too. And Roosevelt's failure to appreciate it is the more astonish- 

 ing when we are informed that he has experimented with a white 

 towel, only to find that his own views are completely vindicated! 

 In this one point, it seems to me, Roosevelt has shown so complete 

 an ignorance of the most elementary laws of color as to go far 

 towards unfitting him for any discussion of the subject of animal 

 coloration, while showing besides an inability to profit from obser- 

 vation which must vitiate to a great extent the value of the observa- 

 tions which his wide field experience has enabled him to make. 



I have before spoken of Roosevelt's dogmatism. Akin to that 

 is his propensity for loose statements such as that on page 184, 

 where he says that the two forms of the red fox, the typical red 

 and the cross fox, are "equally successful in life." If equally 

 successful, why is not the cross fox as common as the red? Since 



1 A little observation will convince most persons that the light on such a night 

 comes from the sky as a whole rather than from the individual stars and planets. 



