vni ORIGIN AND USES OF COLOUR IN ANIMALS 199 



and having already discussed those protective colours which 

 serve to harmonise animals with their general environment, 

 we have to consider only those cases in which the colour 

 resemblance is more local or special in its character. 



Special or Local Colour Adaptations. 



This form of colour adaptation is generally manifested by 

 markings rather than by colour alone, and is extremely pre- 

 valent both among insects and vertebrates, so that we shall 

 be able to notice only a few illustrative cases. Among our 

 native birds we have the snipe and woodcock, whose markings 

 and tints strikingly accord with the dead marsh vegetation 

 among which they live ; the ptarmigan in its summer dress is 

 mottled and tinted exactly like the lichens which cover the 

 stones of the higher mountains ; while young unfledged plovers 

 are spotted so as exactly to resemble the beach pebbles among 

 which they crouch for protection, as beautifully exhibited in 

 one of the cases of British birds in the Natural History 

 Museum at South Kensington. 



In mammalia, we notice the frequency of rounded spots on 

 forest or tree haunting animals of large size, as the forest 

 deer and the forest cats ; while those that frequent reedy or 

 grassy places are striped vertically, as the marsh antelopes 

 and the tiger. I had long been of opinion that the brilliant 

 yellow and black stripes of the tiger were adaptive, but have 

 only recently obtained proof that it is so. An experienced 

 tiger-hunter, Major Waif or d, states in a letter, that the haunts 

 of the tiger are invariably full of the long grass, dry and pale 

 yellow for at least nine months of the year, which covers the 

 ground wherever there is water in the rainy season, and he 

 adds : "I once, while following up a wounded tiger, failed for 

 at least a minute to see him under a tree in grass at a distance 

 of about twenty yards — jungle open — but the natives saw 

 him, and I eventually made him out well enough to shoot 

 him, but even then I could not see at what part of him I was 

 aiming. There can be no doubt whatever that the colour of 

 both the tiger and the panther renders them almost invisible, 

 especially in a strong blaze of light, when among grass, and 

 one does not seem to notice stripes or spots till they are 

 dead." It is the black shadows of the vegetation that 



