The Making of Species 
ing, who sets at naught the theory of cryptic 
colouring by turning darker in winter! The 
same may be said of the Alpine chamois. 
The advocates of the theory of protective 
colouring assert that the creatures which do not 
turn white in winter are strong and active animals 
which have no enemies to fear. 
This contention is met by F. C. Selous as fol- 
lows (African Nature Notes and Remintscences, 
p. 9): “According to the experience of Arctic 
travellers, large numbers of young musk oxen 
are annually killed by wolves. . . . Nothing, I 
think, is more certain than that a far smaller per- 
centage of so-called protectively coloured giraffes 
are killed annually by lions in Africa than of 
musk oxen by wolves in Arctic America.” 
Another difficulty which confronts the Neo- 
Wallaceian school is that, ex hypothesz, the 
assumption of the white coat was gradual. 
Hence the change in the direction of white- 
ness cannot, in its first beginning, have been 
of perceptible utility to an organism. How 
then can natural selection have operated on it? 
The transparency of pelagic organisms is fre- 
quently cited as exemplifying cryptic colouring. 
We all know that the common jelly-fish is as 
transparent as glass. Floating on the surface of 
the ocean are millions of tiny organisms, so 
transparent as to be invisible to the human eye. 
At first sight this certainly appears to be a 
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