in PROTECTIVE RESEMBLANCES AMONG ANIMALS 77 



in other cases, with the addition of a few that are peculiar to 

 it. The most obvious is, that we have gradations of mimicry 

 and of protective resemblance a fact which is strongly 

 suggestive of a natural process having been at work. Another 

 very serious objection is, that as mimicry has been shown to 

 be useful only to those species and groups which are rare and 

 probably dying out, and. would cease to have any effect should 

 the proportionate abundance of the two species be reversed, 

 it follows that on the special-creation theory the one species 

 must have been created plentiful, the other rare ; and, not- 

 withstanding the many causes that continually tend to alter 

 the proportions of species, these two species must have always 

 been specially maintained at their respective proportions, or 

 the very purpose for which they each received their peculiar 

 characteristics would have completely failed. A third diffi- 

 culty is, that although it is very easy to understand how 

 mimicry may be brought about by variation and the survival 

 of the fittest, it seems a very strange thing for a Creator to 

 protect an animal by making it imitate another, when the 

 very assumption of a Creator implies his power to create it 

 so as to require no such circuitous protection. These appear 

 to be fatal objections to the application of the special-creation 

 theory to this particular case. 



The other two supposed explanations, which may be 

 shortly expressed as the theories of " similar conditions " and 

 of " heredity," agree in making mimicry, where it exists, an 

 adventitious circumstance not necessarily connected with the 

 well-being of the mimicking species. But several of the most 

 striking and most constant facts which have been adduced 

 directly contradict both these hypotheses. The law that 

 mimicry is confined to a few groups only is one of these, for 

 " similar conditions " must act more or less on all groups in a 

 limited region, and "heredity" must influence all groups 

 related to each other in an equal degree. Again, the general 

 fact that those species which mimic others are rare, while 

 those which are imitated are abundant, is in no way explained 

 by either of these theories, any more than is the frequent 

 occurrence of some papable mode of protection in the imitated 

 species. " Reversion to an ancestral type " no way explains 

 why the imitator and the imitated always inhabit the very 



