dred mammals, and the many arboreal birds and several arboreal mammals 

 which have biggish white spots or patches on their backs and sides. The 

 ground beasts of this group are, as has been explained, specially equipped 

 for concealment against the horizon-bordering sky; while the tree birds' and 

 tree beasts' more or less ample, irregular patches of sky-picturing white are 

 in evidently just proportion to the greater or less amplitude and frequency, in 

 their average backgrounds, of sky vistas, and light foliage vistas amidst dark 

 leaves and twigs and tree trunks. 



Next and last in order come the terrestrial and semi-terrestrial birds and 

 other animals which are equipped for concealment against the landscape below 

 the horizon, and have little or no hint of sky-picturing in their costumes. Such 

 are many woodland ground birds, notably the brown tropical ones described 

 in Chapter XIX. Such also are most of the terrestrial woodland mammals; 

 such, again, are snipe, goatsuckers, and many of the small, close-lying Gal- 

 lince (most arboreal species have fragmentary sky-pictures — see the Cock 

 Ruffed Grouse in Plate II) ; such are most frogs and toads and many ground 

 lizards; such are sand crabs; and such, in the most marked degree, are many 

 terrestrial snakes — ^for instance the Copperhead, shown in PlateXI (Chap- 

 ter XXIII). Most of these creatures are patterned with elaborate ground- 

 pictures, and on some species, like the Copperhead snake, these have reached 

 a very high degree of specialization. Because of their low stature and their 

 ground-haunting, close-lying habits, such animals as these scarcely ever, in 

 the view of predators or quarries, stick up above the horizon line. They are 

 colored, with exquisite efficiency, for obliteration or extreme inconspicuousness 

 when looked down at, against a background of mother earth and her lowly 

 vegetable mantle. If men were Lilliputians, and looked up at the flanks and 

 back of the Copperhead snake, as in reality they look down at the sky-pic- 

 turing back-pattern of the piebald skunk, the snake's coloration would seem to 

 them just as "conspicuous" and inappropriate for disguise as the skunk's has 

 always seemed. "It's all in the point of view;" — and if we would learn the 

 true, the compellingly apparent significance of animals' costumes, we must 



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