in PROTECTIVE RESEMBLANCES AMONG ANIMALS 89 



the colours of the vegetable as compared with the wonderful 

 diversity of the animal world. There appears no good reason 

 why trees and shrubs should not have been adorned with as 

 many varied hues and as strikingly designed patterns as birds 

 and butterflies, since the gay colours of flowers show that 

 there is no incapacity in vegetable tissues to exhibit them. 

 But even flowers themselves present us with none of those 

 wonderful designs, those complicated arrangements of stripes 

 and dots and patches of colour, that harmonious blending of 

 hues in lines and bands and shaded spots, which are so 

 general a feature in insects. It is the opinion of Mr. Darwin 

 that we owe much of the beauty of flowers to the necessity 

 of attracting insects to aid in their fertilisation, and that 

 much of the development of colour in the animal world is 

 due to " sexual selection," colour being universally attractive, 

 and thus leading to its propagation and increase ; but while 

 fully admitting this, it will be evident, from the facts and 

 arguments here brought forward, that very much of the 

 variety both of colour and markings among animals is due to 

 the supreme importance of concealment, and thus the various 

 tints of minerals and vegetables have been directly repro- 

 duced in the animal kingdom, and again and again modified 

 as more special protection became necessary. We shall thus 

 have two causes for the development of colour in the animal 

 world, and shall be better enabled to understand how, by 

 their combined and separate action, the immense variety we 

 now behold has been produced. Both causes, however, will 

 come under the general law of "Utility," the advocacy of 

 which, in its broadest sense, we owe almost entirely to Mr. 

 Darwin. A more accurate knowledge of the varied pheno- 

 mena connected with this subject may not improbably give 

 us some information both as to the senses and the mental 

 faculties of the lower animals. For it is evident that if 

 colours which please us also attract them, and if the various 

 disguises which have been here enumerated are equally 

 deceptive to them as to ourselves, then both their powers of 

 vision and their faculties of perception and emotion must be 

 essentially of the same nature as our own a fact of high 

 philosophical importance in the study of our own nature and 

 our true relations to the lower animals. 



