is, that for every one he saw there were as a rule scores, within range of his 

 sight, concealed by the very patterns which he believes to make the species 

 conspicuous! I had, lately, a chance to prove all these things upon a natural- 

 ist who believed, as has always been held, that "conspicuous" patterns, etc., 

 make conspicuous objects. Of each species that he declared to be a con- 

 spicuous one I arranged either a stuffed specimen or a good imitation, and 

 placed it full in his sight, out of doors, in the most natural of situations. And 

 each time he was amazed at failing to find it conspicuous. In every case of a 

 series of such tests, he discovered the specimen only after a more or less long 

 search. 



One case is enough to cite here. He declared a coral snake, with its red, 

 black, and gold rings, to be "the most conspicuous object in Nature." I 

 placed on bare ground some imitation snakes — one black, one scarlet, one 

 gold, one earth-color, and one good facsimile oj a coral snake, with its bright 

 scarlet, gold, and black rings, and the counter shading universal among snakes, 

 and invited him to look at them from a distance of about twelve yards. He 

 saw at once all but the coral snake, and would never have known the latter 

 was there had he not been told. Yet in this case he had been told just where 

 to look, on a bare open space of flat ground. 



I asked him if he still believed that a naturalist's eye takes in most of the 

 coral snakes that come within its range in the complex scenery of the jungle! 

 By such experiments all his beliefs on the subject were one by one confuted, — 

 as, in the end, he most openly and generously acknowledged. 



Concealing- coloration means coloration that matches the background. But 

 since an object's background varies with the point of view, there can be 

 no such thing as complete, intrinsic inconspicuousness. The means of ob- 

 jects' recognizability, no matter how they are colored or marked, is almost 

 always their silhouette — i. e., their outlines in 'relieving' darker or lighter 

 or differently colored against their background. If an object moves about — 

 or, what amounts to the same thing, if the beholder moves about — the object 

 is bound to silhouette in various ways against various backgrounds. If the 



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