128 MIMICRY, AND OTHER PROTECTIVE 
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 philo- 
sophical importance in the study of our own nature 
and our true relations to the lower animals, 
Conclusion. 
Although such a variety of interesting facts have 
been already accumulated, the subject we have been 
discussing is one of which comparatively little is really 
known. The natural history of the tropics has never 
yet been studied on the spot with a full appreciation 
of “what to observe” in this matter. The varied 
ways in which the colouring and form of animals serve 
for their protection, their strange disguises as vege- 
_table or mineral substances, their wonderful mimicry 
of other beings, offer an almost unworked and inex- 
haustible field of discovery for the zoologist, and will 
assuredly throw much light on the laws and conditions 
which have resulted in the wonderful variety of colour, 
shade, and marking which constitutes one of the most 
pleasing characteristics of the animal world, but the 
immediate causes of which it has hitherto been most 
difficult to explain. 
If I have succeeded in showing that in this wide 
and picturesque domain of nature, results which have 
hitherto been supposed to depend either upon those 
incalculable combinations of laws which we term 
chance or upon the direct volition of the Creator, are 
