1911 ] Barbour and Phillips, Concealing Coloration Again, loo 



plates. We should like only to call attention to the fact that 

 during nearly the whole season of greatest luxuriance of aquatic 

 foliage the male Wood Duck, and other species as well, assume a 

 nearly perfect "eclipse" plumage. The feathers are most brilliant 

 during the late autumn, winter, and early spring, when their sur- 

 roundings are of a dead and monotonous color. Hence, if we 

 attributed any protective importance to such color patterns, we 

 should be inclined to consider this of distinct disadvantage. 



We believe the Caprimulgidse, to take one of Mr. Thayer's first 

 examples, to be a family with wonderfully adapted coloration. But 

 here again we cannot but emphasize the enormous value of habit, 

 which seems to us of far more value than color. We have, for 

 instance, found a new white tennis ball an exceedingly difficult 

 object to find, even in short grass; and chiefly for one reason — 

 its habit of keeping still; yet we know approximately where to 

 look for it. 



It must seem that the premise which claims that this subject is 

 one eminently fitted for investigation by an artist, and that it has 

 wrongly been considered a part of the zoologist's province, would 

 need some revision. We are told that "it has waited for an artist 

 in the last years of the nineteenth century not only to recognize 

 the basic working laws of protective coloration, but to perceive 

 that the many animals of supposed conspicuous attire are almost 

 all colored and marked in a way most potent to conceal them." 

 It would seem almost necessary that the painter should have a 

 really wide knowledge of the varying forms and colorations of 

 organisms of several classes of the animal kingdom before such 

 broad statements were made. We have been shown in many cases 

 that the female of a species having one type of coloration is pro- 

 tectively colored; and again that the male of the same species, 

 with perhaps an enormously different type of coloration, is pro- 

 tectively colored also. We get, however, no suggestion as to how 

 this was brought about. We must assume that primitive birds, 

 indeed all birds, started originally with similarly colored males and 

 females. The coloration of the Black Duck as compared to that 

 of the Mallard is a case in point. Now, how and why should such a 

 change have occurred except by sexual selection, or some process 

 directly akin to it, pure and simple? 



