70 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



set in each side the sun. Still, it must not be forgotten that 

 there is the bird's own reflection in the water, with which, when 

 sufficiently emphasized, it must harmonize to perfection. Here, 

 then, at least, is one quite satisfactory background. I cannot 

 myself think of another, but, should it still be thought necessary, 

 there is no doubt one might be designed. 



Still, with every assistance, and for all that has been said, 

 these Grebes, as examples of assimilative colouring, seem to me 

 to stand in a very different category to such a bird, for instance, 

 as the Golden Plover. Whilst on the way here from the home- 

 stead, a nest of one of these birds was located, and marked for 

 me with a few turfs by Sigurdsson and, for some time now, I 

 have watched the female as she sits with almost the whole of 

 her body exposed, yet the mottled and nondescript markings 

 of the back and breast seem to fade into. the general coloration 

 of the whole of the surrounding landscape, which is a wide 

 expanse of brown earth, tawny grasses, and grey moss, in 

 the unsalient interblending of which her own comparative 

 insaliency is hardly to be distinguished at a moderate range, 

 through the glasses. The general tone and colour-wash here 

 seem designed for the eye to rest on, without being caught or 

 detained, but this does not apply so well to the deep black of 

 the throat, breast, and abdomen (speaking of the male more par- 

 ticularly) which show when the bird walks about. This, being 

 the nuptial garb, has probably been gained through sexual 

 selection, as, indeed, tbe golden back also, though in the latter 

 there is far more reconcilement between two not necessarily 

 opposed principles ; for why should not sexual selection some- 

 times have operated under the control of the larger power, 

 Natural Selection, which would, in this case, have fixed the kind 

 and the limit of the adornment ? Indeed, in a wide way, this 

 must always be so, for directly the advantages gained by the 

 race, owing to special attractiveness being acquired by the one 

 sex in the eyes of the other, began to be overpowered through 

 the greater destruction due to its consequent enhanced con- 

 spicuousness, this process would be checked, and a compromise 

 between it and the other effected.* With the Golden Plover, in 



* Of course all is really Natural Selection, and the seeming opposition 

 merely a fluctuation in the manner of its action. 



