antelopes, hares, etc., by white tails and rumps. More characteristic even 

 than the grubbing carnivores' sky-matching ^eoc^patterns are these more or 

 less 'eclipsable' rear-end flight-masks of timid, fleet ruminants and larger 

 rodents. When these beasts flee at night before terrestrial enemies — which are 

 nearly always of lower stature than their quarries, and in most cases addition- 

 ally fated to look upward at them by the fact of the quarry's high- jumping 

 gait, and their own crouchitig and slinking — when these hunted beasts flee 

 thus, their brightly displayed sky-lit white sterns blot out their foreshortened 

 bodies against the sky. In the night, the illusion must often be complete, 

 and most beneficent to the hunted beast, who by its aid may often just avoid 

 the lion's or the tiger's or the cougar's or the cheetah's killing second spring;— 

 vanishing into air, as it were, before the predator can get his aim for the leap, 

 or before he can perceive the direction of his quarry's flight. For photographic 

 illustrations of this marking's obliterative effect, see Figs. 107-115. Such 

 rear-end sky-pictures are worn by most fleet ruminants of the open land, and 

 by many rodents with more or less nearly corresponding habits — notably 

 the hares, and several smaller running or leaping rodents whose terrestrial 

 enemies are many of them beasts of low stature — ^like weasels, minks, snakes, 

 etc., and foxes, that slink and crouch. The ruminants that lack such mark- 

 ings are most of them either extremely big and powerful — like some of the 

 huge African antelopes, and almost all the bovine beasts — or else they live in 

 dense tropical forests, where at night there is very little 'overhead' light for 

 them to relieve against. Some of the little South American jungle deer are 

 good examples of this forest-haunting class. 



All these various sorts of wonderfully effective sky-picture patterns are 

 worn by animals that are habitually or most commonly looked up at, either 

 by their enemies or by their quarries. Indeed, the presence or absence, the 

 high or scanty development, of such markings in an animal's pattern, seems to 

 be a direct and accurate indication of whether, in the average view of the 

 creatures from whom it most profits the animal to be concealed, it comes above 

 or below the horizon line — and of the largeness of the preponderance in either 



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