CHAPTER V 



COLOUR AND PATTERN IN ANIMALS 



It very often happens that young animals, even although they may 

 closely resemble their parents in structure, wear liveries with 

 different colours and patterns. A full-grown lion {see Plate III) 

 is nearly uniformly brown ; his coat is rather paler on the 

 under parts, and his mane and tail-tuft may be tinged with black ; 

 and some individuals, especially honesses, may show very faint 

 traces of spots. But lion-cubs are spotted animals. The American 

 tapir (Plate VI, p. 94) is very dark in colour, almost black all over 

 except for a white line round the edge of the shell of the ear ; the 

 Malayan tapir is parti-coloured, the head, fore-quarters and legs 

 being black, but with a great saddle of white covering the hinder 

 part of the back and passing down under the ventral surface. 

 Young tapirs for the first two or three months of their existence 

 are vividly striped and spotted with white, and the pattern of the 

 Malayan and the American forms is almost identical. Red deer 

 are coloured almost uniformly reddish-brown, except for a light 

 patch or disc on the rump, but the young fawns are conspicuously 

 spotted (Plate V, p. 92). There are few living creatures so bril- 

 liantly coloured as the male birds-of -paradise. The head, back, 

 the upper surface of the wings and tail of the king bird-of-paradise, 

 for instance, are resplendent with a glow partly orange and partly 

 scarlet, and there is a breastplate of metalUc green from which a little 

 bunch of brown feathers tipped with green hangs down at each side. 

 The chest and the lower part of the body are pure white, and the 

 long plumes which project from the tail terminate in shining tufts 

 of green rolled up so that they resemble the eyes on the feathers 

 of a peacock. The upper parts of young males are clothed with 

 sad-coloured brown, and their chests and under parts are banded and 

 mottled with a paler brown. Sea-gulls are brilhantly patterned 

 birds, the general effect being black-and-white, the chest and under 

 parts being white, and the head being covered with a cape or 

 mantle of black or dark grey. Young sea-gulls {see Plate VIII, p. 162) 



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