1912 J Allen, The Concealing Coloration Question. 501 



impression upon us, not the perhaps larger number of individuals 

 of the same species that come within sight of us when we are in their 

 haunts but of which we have no knowledge. Experiments like 

 Thayer's, conducted privately or in conjunction with other persons, 

 are, it seems to me, the most profitable mode of study of the con- 

 cealing power of coloration, for only by some such means can these 

 inherent difficulties be avoided. 



I am aware that there is some distrust of Mr. Thayer's methods 

 of experiment and demonstration, on the ground that in some cases 

 he has not reproduced accurately the natural surroundings of the 

 animals experimented with. It seems to me that such failure 

 to duplicate natural conditions need not be counted against the 

 method itself. Of course, experiments are of little value if we do 

 not know just what the environment of an animal is, but if we 

 do know it and can reproduce it approximately in our home land- 

 scape, the method is a perfectly legitimate one. The fact that Mr. 

 Thayer may have been mistaken in regard to the habitat of the 

 Peacock does not vitiate all his experiments, but he and any one 

 else who conducts experiments along this line must, of course, 

 take pains to copy natural conditions faithfully. And we must 

 not leave all the experimenting to Mr. Thayer. 



There are other tendencies of the human mind that must be 

 guarded against in prosecuting our studies. One of these I suspect 

 ornithologists are especially subject to. That is the tendency 

 to see what we know is there rat,her than what actually appears to 

 the eye. We are probably more subject to it than most persons 

 because we deal so constantly with what I may call absolute color, 

 — color that is such by virtue of pigmentation and structure, not 

 color as seen out of doors in varying lights and subject to the 

 influence of countless neighboring colors. We see a bird's under 

 parts as white, sometimes doubtless because we know they are 

 white, and sometimes by the eye's unconsciously making allow- 

 ance for the effect of shade. In the case of an unrecognized bird 

 observed in the field, we take the greatest pains to get it in the 

 best possible light, and we are constantly translating its apparent 

 colors into terms of the absolute colors that we know or suspect 

 them to represent. That is the only way that we can identify 

 an unfamiliar bird, — without having it in the hand, where no 



