118 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



he stared at us, his red coat vivid against the green marsh. 

 Another of these marsh-deer swam the river ahead of us; 

 I shot at it as it landed, and ought to have got it, but did 

 not. As always with these marsh-deer — and as with so 

 many other deer — I was struck by the revealing or ad- 

 vertising quality of its red coloration; there was nothing 

 in its normal surroundings with which this coloration 

 harmonized; so far as it had any effect whatever it was al- 

 ways a revealing and not a concealing effect. When the 

 animal fled the black of the erect tail was an additional 

 revealing mark, although not of such startlingly advertis- 

 ing quality as the flag of the whitetail. The whitetail, in 

 one of its forms, and with the ordinary whitetail custom of 

 displaying the white flag as it runs, is found in the im- 

 mediate neighborhood of the swamp-deer. It has the same 

 foes. Evidently it is of no survival consequence whether 

 the running deer displays a white or a black flag. Any 

 competent observer of big game must be struck by the fact 

 that in the great majority of the species the coloration is 

 not concealing, and that in many it has a highly revealing 

 quality. Moreover, if the spotted or striped young repre- 

 sent the ancestral coloration, and if, as seems probable, the 

 spots and stripes have, on the whole, some slight conceal- 

 ing value, it is evident that in the life history of most of 

 these large mammals, both among those that prey and those 

 that are preyed on, concealing coloration has not been a 

 survival factor; throughout the ages during which they 

 have survived they have gradually lost whatever of con- 

 cealing coloration they may once have had — if any — and 

 have developed a coloration which under present conditions 

 has no concealing and perhaps even has a revealing quality, 



