oblitemtive compounding; on the other it is used, at its face value, for direct 

 'background' picturing. Skunks, teledus, and the rest, long believed by natu- 

 ralists to be colored for warning conspicuousness (proclaimant of their foul 

 defensive equipment), have, in fact, the universal obliterative coloration. 

 Seen from above on open ground, as men commonly see them, they are some- 

 times very showy beasts, with their big, skylit patches of yellowish white, and 

 their darkly shadowed undersides. But how different is the view their ter- 

 restrial victims get of them! To these little animals — insects and small 

 vertebrates of many kinds — they commonly loom up against the sky, towering 

 high and huge as an elephant would above a skunk. Their big, bold patches 

 of white and black are then about as potently obliterative as a beast's pattern 

 can ever be — as is proved by our photographs (Figs. 95-97). According to the 

 angle at which they are seen, their lustrous white* either nearly or exactly 

 matches the brightness of the sky, while their dark patches are left to look like 

 bushes, boulders, or more distant trees standing up above the horizon. All 

 this is attested beyond question by our photographs, as the reader will agree. 

 And he must consider that these pictures were taken in full daylight — a far 

 severer test of such an effect than the dim light of night. For at night, sky and 

 sky-pictures being correspondingly and greatly dimmed, the casual discrep- 

 ancies of shade between them are reduced to almost nothing. The whole 

 illusion, of course, is better in a dim light, since it depends wholly on bold, 

 simple counterfeiting of background 'values' or shades. Skunks, and most or 

 all of the other mammals that are colored like them, are grubbing terrestrial 

 hunters, and nocturnal, and hence are served by their boldly pied white and 

 black patterns in the manner shown by our pictures, but on the whole even 

 more potently, by virtue of the dimness of the light in which they commonly 

 hunt. The white stripe on the Common Skunk's forehead and snout — ^a mark- 

 ing shared by several other grubbing ground-beasts, and among them some 

 with light colored bellies, e. g., the badgers {Meles and Taxidea) — splays an im- 



* The actually pale yellow hairs are so lustrous as to look brighter, in such views, than lusterless 

 pure white could. 



148 



