Vol XXX 



I'd; 



Barbour, The Case of Roosevelt bs. Thayer. b/ 



lighl was coming from the direction of the antelope towards the 

 lion, or that the ground sloped in the opposite direction; i. e. from 

 the lion towards the antelopes, or supposing thai the ground was 

 level or undulating, or supposing, again, that the lion was watching 

 for its prey from some eminence, overlooking the feeding ground 

 of the antelopes, then the protecting value of this coloration would 

 he nil. As a matter of fact, lions kill nightly, or whenever they 

 care to. No traveller has ever found them starving to death or 

 unable to provide as much food for themselves and their young as 

 they needed. 



The rabbit's greatest enemy in England is the stoat, in New 

 England, the weasel. These enemies hunt by scent alone. They 

 are the only enemies which the rabbits have that would have a 

 visual horizon line low enough for the rabbits white tail etc. to act 

 in an obliterative manner. Every game keeper in England will 

 tell Mr. Thayer, if he asks, that once a stoat takes up a rabbit's 

 trail, the rabbit is absolutely sure to die. Of course, experiments 

 made with dummies and dead skins do not bring out this fact. 

 Using no living animals Mr. Thayer does not realize that color 

 perception and the range of vision vary widely among different 

 organisms. We call his attention to the enormous mass of past 

 and current literature in animal psychology, having to do with 

 experimental work in just such matters as the color perceptions 

 of animals. Could he not correspond with some of these workers, 

 Prof. Ik. M. Yerkes of Cambridge, for example, to their advantage 

 and to his. 



The question is not always are all organisms protectively colored, 

 but do protective colors protect? This, perhaps, is capable of 

 being tested by carefully controlled experiments conducted with 

 living animals under conditions as nearly as possible natural. 

 We do not wish for interpretations in terms of human vision. We 

 do not care to know what is perceptible to the splendidly trained 

 artist but rather what animals themselves see and how other 

 organisms appear to them. So far, our meagre knowledge permits 

 US to say that we have no direct conclusive proof of the efficacy of 

 special coloration. Davenport, in investigating the number of 

 fowls killed by vermin, i. e., weasels, etc. thought that there was the 

 greatest mortality among the solid colored birds, but Pearl, with 



