322 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



of animals ? If Teufelsdrockh reduced society to a theory of 

 clothes, it would seem that many advocates of Mimicry represent 

 nature by a theory of masks. We observe a strong similarity 

 between an animal and its environment, or between one which 

 we believe possesses a quality procuring immunity from attack, 

 and another in which that quality is absent, and we conclude 

 that the resemblance or mimicry is equally observable by other 

 creatures. Surely an element of error is present in this de- 

 duction. Is our world as we see it — and thus can only imagine 

 it — -the same in actual identity as that known by the sense 

 cognitions of all animal life ? If, as has been ably remarked, 

 the universe contained only blind and deaf beings, it is impossible 

 for us to imagine but that darkness and silence should reign 

 everywhere.* If, on the other hand, we allow — as surely we 

 ought — variation to exist in sense perceptions, as it undoubtedly 

 does in the structure of sense organs, then, without leaving this 

 planet, we may well understand that there are " other worlds 

 than ours." Even in homology and variation, as Bateson has 

 observed, "we have allowed ourselves to judge too much by 

 human criterions of difficulty, and we have let ourselves fancy 

 that nature has produced the forms of life from each other in the 

 ways which we would have used, if we had been asked to do it."t 

 Our knowledge of the sense organs in the lower animals is still 

 very imperfect, and sometimes erroneous. Thus Weismann, in 

 his lecture on the *' Retrogressive Development in Nature," 

 delivered in 1866, refers to the " Csecilians, tropical worm-like 

 or snake-like Amphibians, living underground," as having *' lost 

 not only the sense of sight, but that of hearing also." When this 

 lecture was translated and published in this country a few years 

 later, the author added a footnote, that " Recent researches have 

 shown us that these animals not only possess a complete auditory 

 apparatus, but that it is even more perfect than in other Am- 

 phibia " ; and he adds, as a justification for the statement on 

 which he founded his former conclusions, that " Up to the present 

 time our knowledge of the auditory organ of Ccscilia has been 

 founded upon the statements of two excellent observers, Pro- 

 fessors Retzius and Wiedersheim ; but the material at their 



" Huxley, ' Collected Essays,' vol. vi. p. 253. 

 f ' Materials lor the Study of Variation,' p. 33. 



