( 341 ) 



BIOLOGICAL SUGGESTIONS. 



MIMICKY. 



By W. L. Distant. 



(Continued from p. 315.) 



In all reflections on the wonderful adaptations in nature by 

 which living creatures obtain a protection from their enemies by 

 assimilative colour or structure, we must remember that in the 

 struggle for existence fecundity plays no small part in producing 

 survival. As De Quincey spoke of man in China as being but a 

 weed, so throughout nature we often find excessive reproduction 

 alone preventing extermination, and quite replacing the aid of 

 protective or mimetic disguise in the " survival of the fittest." It 

 is no longer the protection of the few, but the superfluous number 

 of the attacked that militates against annihilation. As Mr. 

 Harting has observed : — " The enormous rate of increase in fish, 

 as compared with the rate of increase in their natural enemies, 

 will always result in there being enough to spare for man and 

 Otter — ay, for Kingfisher and Heron too."* Weismann recog- 

 nizes the same truth in the remark : — " No better arrangement 

 for the maintenance of the species under such circumstances can 

 be imagined than that supplied by diminishing the duration of 

 life, and simultaneously increasing the rapidity of reproduction." f 

 Take the Orthoptera as found on the Transvaal veld — where most 

 of these pages were written — which not only during the summer 

 season literally supply the almost sole avian banquet, but are doubt- 

 less the prey of other enemies as well ; and, although the usual 

 colouration of these insects is more or less approximate to the 

 short grasses among which they live, no apparent protection is 

 afforded thereby, and their great reproductive powers seem their 

 only protection against extinction. The American Lobster is 

 another case in point. Mr. F. H. Herrick, of the United States Fish 

 Commission, who suggests that its habits are the same as that of 

 the European representative, states that out of the 10,000 eggs 

 produced at one time, not more than two arrive at maturity, and 

 that even that estimate is probably too high, as the fisheries are 



* ' Zoologist,' 3rd ser. vol. xviii. pp. 44-5 



f ' Lectures on Heredity,' &c. Eng. Transl. 2nd edit. vol. i. p. 17 



