296 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



be the artist's instinct) to get rid of the bizarre effect which 

 it produces under nature, and to show the proper eye in a proper 

 and ordinary manner. In reality, however, it is very difficult 

 to see the bird with any eye but this false, staring white one, 

 which, as it were, puts the real eye out, and though not near 

 enough to it, properly to take its place, in appearance, yet 

 is sufficiently so to stand for it in a burlesque sort of way ; so 

 that with this much more conspicuous and larger white circular 

 mark, forcing itself on his attention, the observer finds it difficult 

 to give the right pictorial value to the actual eye, or even, with- 

 out an effort, to see or locate it, as such. A sort of pantomime 

 effect of a grotesque-looking bird with a great, flat, white eye, 

 which he knows is no eye, but can't help placing and seeing as 

 such — it so overpowers, as it were, the real one — is what 

 one gets in live nature, but not at all in the plate referred 

 to, nor, I suspect in any plate. Now, the eyes of various birds 

 are so brilliantly coloured as to make it indubitable for anyone 

 who accepts the Darwinian theory of sexual selection (its 

 acceptance, I believe, will, one day, be universal) that they have 

 been rendered thus conspicuous through its agency. This 

 makes this white spot, in place, as it were, of an eye which alone 

 is quiet and orderly, in the midst of a face suggestive of carnival 

 time an interesting thing. It is as though the female Harlequin 

 Duck had missed, in it, something that should have been more 

 in accordance with the general bizarrerie of its surroundings, 

 and as the iris itself did not afford the necessary variations for 

 selection to seize upon, had used, as a substitute, some which 

 occurred, not far off it, in the feathering, and thus produced 

 a mock eye, such as the law of artistic harmony (parallel to that 

 which governs vocalic utterance) required in such a setting. It 

 is difficult to assign any other special significance to these white 

 spots. Signal- or recognition-marks they can hardly be, for 

 they are eclipsed in this possible function by the much larger 

 ones against the bill— too large for the effect here noticed, even 

 had they been in place — and, moreover, the whole bird, if we 

 accept this view, has been evolved as a signal, but only of one 

 sex to the other. Of course, it may be said that the spot being 

 thus situated, and just of the size and shape that it is, is a mere 

 chance which has no significance. But to talk in this way, where 



