HABITS AND COLORATION OF THE STARLING. 291 
(Finch, Pigeon, Common Fowl—possibly all birds) are colour- 
blind to blue. I have not been able to consult the original 
paper (‘Onderz. Phys. Lab. Utrecht,’ 1881, vi. pp. 297-814), 
and know only of his careful work with the micro-spectroscope 
on the retina through an article by T. Brudenell Carter (cf. 
‘Nature, May 15th, 1890, pp. 55-61; and ‘ Smithsonian Report,’ 
1890, pp. 687-704). How many ornithological students have 
stopped to consider this question of colour-blindness in birds ?* 
Romanes has shown that some at least of the higher Apes are 
colour-blind, and it is comparatively a modern discovery that 
many men are so afflicted. The writer of a well-known work 
dealing largely with the colours of birds makes one statement 
that is so much at variance with my own experience that I 
cannot avoid thinking one of us must be abnormal; and this 
does not help one to accept with any confidence the lively 
speculations made in the past by those who have written on the 
esthetic tastes of birds. 
The inside of a pearly shell is quite as beautiful as the lustre 
of a Starling, and the same colours are repeated in greater 
brilliance when a drop of oil spreads on still water. In two of 
these cases we can agree that the beauty is useless—and can we 
not think that the beauty of a Starling or a Humming Bird is 
useless also? The actual polish of the feathers certainly repels 
water, and is so far useful, and perhaps we can ascribe the 
colour to the fact that the feather has a sort of reservoir of new 
surfaces, and that when one surface becomes worn and roughened 
another is ready to take its place, in exactly the manner in 
which we use a sketching or a scribbling block. Here we should 
have in a reversed form the changes that lend the colour to the 
growing Haliotis shell, where the lining is produced in thin 
iayers. Of course this is pure speculation, and I should not 
like to think that it would be accepted as anything else. 
Like most other common birds, the Starling is well worth 
* In spring the House-Sparrow frequently does much damage to crocuses 
in our gardens. The blooms are destroyed, but, apparently, not eaten, and 
many people have remarked that the yellow crocuses are the chief sufferers. 
Indeed, I have been informed that Sparrows never touch purple flowers. 
This is not correct, for I have seen them destroy the purple varieties of 
crocus; but there is no question that the yellow kinds are far and away the 
worst sufferers. This quite agrees with Waelchili’s investigations on the 
structure of the “‘rods and cones”? of the retina. 
