COLOURS AND COLORATION 27 



There is certainly nothing to lead us to believe that 

 these peculiarities of pattern are recent developments 

 due to what we may call modern, or existing, factors 

 of selection : that is to say they are not due to the 

 action of selective forces now at work determining 

 the survival of such variations only, in new-born and 

 adolescent individuals, as make for the evolution of 

 this or that particular pattern and coloration. Yet they 

 do represent the action of just these transforming factors 

 on the generations of a remote past, and they have 

 survived till to-day in just so many instances as they 

 have continued to be efficient patterns : and, in so 

 far, they are of course still subject to the sumptuary 

 laws of natural selection, which is concerned now, so to 

 speak, only with maintaining the ancient standard of 

 adaptive perfection. 



But what facts are there in support of the foregoing 

 assumptions ? And what interpretation is to be placed 

 on types of coloration which, it may be inferred, do 

 not display this mark of the dead hand, so to speak ? 

 Briefly, young mammals may be either : longitudinally 

 striped, transversely striped, spotted, or self-coloured. And 

 while in any of such cases they may reflect the colora- 

 tion of their parents, very commonly they do not. 

 The most interesting of all these types of coloration, in 

 many respects, is the first named on our list ; it is also 

 the least common, so far as mammals are concerned, 

 though it is a somewhat remarkable fact that longitudinal 

 stripes occur in young animals of all kinds. We meet 

 with them among the birds, the reptiles, the amphibia, the 

 fishes, and in the larval stages of many groups of lowlier 

 animals ; and in all these cases, as among the mammals, 

 the parents display a totally diverse type of coloration. 



