The white next the yellow seems to glow with purple, yellow's opposite. By 

 the same token, two actual complementary colors side by side are much more 

 powerfully brilliant than two kindred ones so placed. This law has yet other 

 bearings on our present subject. It tends to explain the otherwise somewhat 

 anomalous bright red of certain strictly foliage-haunting birds, like the sev- 

 eral tanagers and trogons. How can such birds, living almost always among 

 green leaves, in a bath of green light, profit by wearing the most vivid red, the 

 diametric opposite of foliage-color? The answer, in part, is this: dimmed 

 by the strong bath of green light, the bird's red, actually brilliant, looks barely 

 brighter than many of the glowing brown interstices, the paler shadows on 

 dead leaves, twigs and tree trunks amidst the verdant foliage. Even brown 

 dead leaves most favorably situated for showing off their color amidst live foli- 

 age are brighter than bright-red tanagers or trogons least favorably situated 

 for display against a like background. Also, there are, commonly, many dis- 

 eased leaves amid the foliage with red as bright as the birds'. But there is no 

 denying the fact that some of these birds, for instance the northern Scarlet 

 Tanager, are more conspicuous in the green woods than their foliage-colored 

 kindred. On the other hand, again, it is true that bright, strongly contrasted 

 hues, and red among the rest, well serve to produce 'ruptive' effects in the 

 color-neutralizing, deeply green-steeped light of the leafy labyrinth in which 

 such birds live, where dimmer tints could not hold their own. This is the way 

 with the beautiful red-and-green trogons, which are by no means easy to dis- 

 cover in their native woods, though vociferous and tame. In tropical as in 

 temperate woodlands, however, the smaller gleaning birds and flycatchers of 

 the shaded lower leafage are characteristically green and yellow and olive, 

 without very bold markings. They live fairly hidden amidst shaded foliage, so 

 that dim leaves in a near view, undiversified by other landscape-details, form 

 their normal background. In his admirable paper on the birds of Trinidad, 

 at the mouth of the Orinoco River * Mr. F. M. Chapman, the American nat- 



* "On the Birds of the Island of Trinidad," Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural His- 

 tory, vol. vi, 1894. 



