GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 



IF the reader has been kind enough to read carefully through the 

 foregoing pages, he will be, I feel sure, bewildered with the mass 

 of diction that I have placed before him, and with the numerous 

 references that it has entailed. 



To endeavour to quiet his brain, and relieve him of that 

 chaos of impressions which I have been trying to make on his con- 

 volutions, and in order to convince him of the truth of what I said, 

 as I am myself convinced, I will gather up all the threads of my 

 discourses into some General Conclusions. 



From the evidences before me it has become my belief that : 



(a) The rosettes of the Jaguar and Leopard are pigment-pictures 

 of ancestral calcareous armour, which consisted of bone-rosettes ; 

 and that the markings of these Cats are the closest resemblance 

 we have left to this sort of inheritance. In other mammals 

 modifications of ancestral rosettes have been very great, so that 

 the vestigial resetting is now in many cases hardly recognisable ; 



(b) In the Jaguar and Leopard, these original picture-plates 

 have been maintained by natural selection, while in others, their 

 disappearance has been brought about, more or less, also by 

 natural selection ; 



(c) Among the ungulates, the dappled Horse, the Zebu, and 

 the Giraffe are the nearest resemblances we now have to the 

 original ancestral picture-plating, and that all other markings, 

 whether spotting or striping, as in the Cats, are modifications of 

 dappling or resetting ; 



