12 MOSTLY MAMMALS 
Be this as it may, we have no sort of difficulty in 
realising why many desert-haunting animals have ex- 
changed a striped or spotted coat for one of which the 
colour is manifestly in harmony with the natural surround- 
ings. Our real difficulties occur in the cases where animals 
have a very similar kind of habitat, but display a total 
difference in their type of coloration. Why, for instance, 
have many kinds of deer—notably the Indian sambar and 
its kindred—discarded their original spotted dress for one 
of a sombre brown or red, while others, like the chital 
(at all seasons) and the fallow-deer (in summer), have 
retained the primitive dress? Or why, again, are the 
African bushbucks and kudus, which are as much forest 
animals as the sambar, some of the most brilliantly 
coloured of all hoofed animals? If a variegated and 
brilliantly coloured coat is essential to the well-being of 
these animals, why is it not equally essential to the 
sambar, or vice versa? It is in regard to questions like 
these that naturalists want help and assistance from 
sportsmen and travellers, for at present they are working 
to a great extent in the dark owing to lack of definite 
and accurate observations in regard to the relation of 
the colouring of these and other mammals to their 
surroundings. 
In spite, however, of our ignorance of the reason why 
some forest animals should be uniformly dark-coloured 
while others are more or less brilliantly striped, the con- 
clusion is being gradually forced upon us that in both cases 
protection is the object. Apparently, as pointed out in the 
sequel, the true explanation is that the spotted and striped 
species inhabit bush, or the more open parts of the forest, 
while dusky species like the sambar frequent dense thickets, 
as, indeed, Sir Samuel Baker states, is the habit of the 
