THEORIES OF MIMICRY 565 



humidity goes always a corresponding enriching of the vegetation which 

 forms the species' background. Let these investigators push through 

 the mangroves that border this sultry aired forest against the bare 

 sands of the gulf, and they will find, two steps out upon the beacb, in a 

 saturated ocean atmosphere, a beach and ocean fauna of the purest 

 beach and ocean colors, palest gray and pearl. 



Black-and-gold is as truly the background color of the flower haunt- 

 ing black-and-gold wasp, as is stone-weed-and-sand color of the stone- 

 and-weed-and-sand colored sandpiper. Scarlet and yellow fruit colors, 

 sky-blue and green leaf colors, on the macaw, are as absolutely the pic- 

 ture of this bird's background while he is dangerously absorbed in feed- 

 ing in a tropical fruit tree, as is the little terrestrial mammal's brown 

 the picture of the universal earth-brown on which he lives. The thou- 

 sands of species of open ocean fish, the bare sand-dwellers and the 

 ocean-air-fliers, all wear only the colors that characterize their back- 

 grounds, often adding for the breeding season bits of the scenery of their 

 nesting place, as in the case of puffins, whose gaudy breeding-season- 

 bill on guard at the mouth of the burrow, obliterates the dark hole 

 itself, and at the same time substitutes a semblance of flowers to com- 

 plete the deception. The moment these domestic duties are over, and 

 the puffin back in the open sea, we behold him dressed again in the 

 universal ocean-and-rock colors of his habitat. (To show that no 

 physiological difficulty prohibits fish, for instance, from wearing gaudy 

 colors, we find such colors upon them wherever they live amidst bril- 

 liant corals and brilliant water-plants.) 



To complete the above argument, notice that, as my illustrations 

 show, it is in the midst of vegetation, or other confusing and more or 

 less eclipsing surroundings, that monochrome is far the best costume for 

 identification, while out in the open spaces, the air, the beach, and the 

 sea, there, where no twigs or other forest details threaten to confuse the 

 identity of pattern, striking devices of all kinds would have their fullest 

 chance to effect the identification for which they have been supposed to 

 exist. And what do we find? We find nature foregoing, from end to 

 end of the world, every chance to make use of this obvious opportunity. 



Furthermore, to show that it is not a matter of regions, notice, as I 

 have pointed out, the gilded wasps living within a few feet of earth- 

 colored ants, and little earth-colored rodents swarming on the brown 

 forest floor, two feet below bright dressed inhabitants of the bright 

 dressed overhanging foliage. "Why do not these rodents, forever preyed 

 upon, in fact the stand-by diet of carnivora in every order, why do they 

 not develop unpalatability and badges? All attainable unpalatability 

 they must possess, after their immeasurable period of being picked from, 

 but why not the badges ? The truth appears to be that all advantageous 

 attributes have, in every animal, grown side by side, and that the cul- 



