MEANING OF JAGUAR AND LEOPARD ROSETTES 103 



The solid rosettes, Nos. i and 2, and other forms of solid 

 i-osettes, are to be found mainly along the spine and on the abdo- 

 minal surface ; while the dissociated rosettes shown in No. 32 are 

 from the shoulder of the Jaguar. For reasons to be seen elsewhere 

 I would consider No. 31 as the typical Jaguar rosette from which all 

 the other modifications have resulted. The fused ring, when it 

 occurs, may be either circular, polygonal, oval, or beaked, as seen 

 in Nos. 3, 4, 5, and 7. It will be seen that the enclosed space, 

 which is often of a different shade ^ from that of the general ground 

 colour, sometimes contains one or more minute spots or specks, as 

 in Nos. 27, 30, and 31. 



Then No. 33 is a group from the flank of a Cheetah in the 

 Natural History Museum, No. 34 is from a similar animal in the 

 Zoological Gardens, and No. 35 is a group from the haunch of a 

 Cheetah in the Science and Art Museum of Edinburgh. 



These rosettes have been taken from various skins, but I think 

 most of them can be matched from the skins of Figs. 4-7. 



If the reader would take a pencil and draw outlines of the 

 different variations in the rosettes of the skins given, he would be 

 astonished with their variableness. Stretching of certain parts of the 

 skin might perhaps, as I said, partly account for dissociation, and 

 pressure and contraction might cause fusion, but I do not pretend 

 to explain how all this occurs. Some idea of the process may per- 

 haps be got by stating that in the embryo, while all the parts are 

 semi-fluid, the pigment cells attract each other and fuse into bigger 

 drops, just as minute discs of oil floating on water would now and 

 again fuse into bigger discs if they came in contact, or would 

 form groups of discs huddled together, and separated only by a 

 capillary film of water. 



This obviously would not account for the fact that, along the 



1 Note this. 



