THE WAY OF THE WILD SI 
selection tends to make it more so. On the other hand, the 
color may be unfortunate, in which case the species will go 
through the world with a perpetual handicap, except as selection 
is able to tone it down and relieve it of some of its hardship. 
Color is not based upon utility, nor is it dependent for its 
function upon the presence of light. Some of the most brilliantly 
colored fishes reside in the depths of the sea, so remote that no 
ray of light ever reaches them. Everything must have some 
relation to light and therefore will have some color when brought 
into its rays. If it reflects them all, it will be white ; if it absorbs 
them all and reflects none, it will be black ; if it absorbs all but 
the red, it will reflect those rays and we will call it red; if it 
absorbs the red and reflects only the yellow and the blue, we will 
call it green, and so on with the infinite changes and combinations 
that result through the relations of absorption and reflection. 
So we might go on indefinitely, showing how fits and adapta- 
tions, with startling accuracy, arise after all in perfectly natural, 
not to say inevitable, ways. These details are not the result of 
design but of accident.! The design lies much farther back in 
the great scheme of life, infinitely more complex and wonderful 
than these details that strike our attention, and which exhibit 
rather the variety of nature’s design than a deliberate intent at 
duplication or a determination to favor one species over another. 
With this glimpse into the way of the wild we are prepared 
for a somewhat detailed discussion of the principal facts involved 
in the further adaptation of animals and plants to the needs and 
purposes of man. 
1 Those who might be inclined to object to the statement that every detail 
in nature is in a large sense accidental should consider such cases as the sloth, 
which is a grayish green in his natural haunts, but in captivity gradually loses 
the greenish tinge and fades out to a dull gray. The reason of this is that the 
greenish tinge was originally no part of the sloth, but was due to the green 
chlorophyll of the minute alge that are enabled to live upon its hair, the 
moist climate and the sluggish habits of the creature being both favorable to 
the vegetable growth. Any number of equally striking instances could be 
given to show that color is in its origin largely accidental. Of course under 
natural selection only the more favorable cases could survive. 
