CHAPTER I 



GENERAL OUTLINE OF THE BOOK'S SCOPE. THE a LAW WHICH UNDERLIES 

 PROTECTIVE COLORATION" INTRODUCED 



PROTECTIVE COLORATION," with its achievement of the wonder- 

 ful inconspicuousness of many wild animals in their native haunts, 

 has been recognized since the earliest days of Natural History study. But the 

 true character of this phenomenon has been ignored or misinterpreted, and 

 the phenomenon itself has been observed only in one small corner of its wide 

 field of action. It has waited for an artist, in the last years of the nineteenth 

 century, not only to recognize the basic working laws of protective colora- 

 tion, but to perceive that the many animals of supposed "conspicuous" 

 attire are almost all colored and marked in the way most potent to conceal 

 them. 



We will begin with an exposition of the long-ignored laws involved in such 

 protective coloration as has been generally noticed, leaving to be developed 

 in later chapters the revelation of its larger scope. 



Since time immemorial, human hunters must often have been aware of the 

 strange elusiveness of motionless deer in a brown landscape, or of hares or 

 partridges squatting on the ground. Those who stopped to seek the cause of 

 this, perceived that the deer or partridge looked almost exactly like the land- 

 scape or the ground in color, and were satisfied with this explanation; and 

 thus was evolved that stock phrase of nature students, which has found a 

 place in almost all books about animals, that these inconspicuous creatures 

 are "colored like their surroundings," But it is our first task to show that 

 this logical-seeming and universally accepted explanation is inadequate and 

 misleading, and to vindicate the paradoxical-sounding statement that if crea- 



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