portant part in his disguisement. As he shambles over a field, with his seeking 

 snout held close to the ground, this white stripe, in the view of the little ground 

 beasts he approaches, 'lets down the sky' through his black head and fore- 

 shortened bulky body, splitting the apparition into narrow, un-beast-like halves, 

 which look like sticks or weeds or more distant bushes or boulders showing 

 above the horizon. The several variations in the form and proportions of the 

 sky-picturing white top-patterns of skunks and skunk.-like beasts are all in 

 more or less obvious conformity with differences in their wearers' ways and 

 places of life. Thus the Common Skunk's main white pattern has a somewhat 

 irregular, a waved and insected, lower outline; while that of the Conepatl or 

 Prairie Skunk (Conepatus mapurito, etc.) is square-cut and straight; and 

 these differences are doubtless, nay, obviously, matched by differences in 

 the beasts' average backgrounds. For the eastern skunk is more often seen 

 against a sky-line broken by trees, stones, and bushes, than is his desert- 

 haunting relative. (Compare Figs. 99 and 100 with Figs. 95 and 98.) Al- 

 though these photographs are from shapeless stuffed skins, they can be trusted 

 in the matter of the main effects of the beasts' patterns, and even the main 

 pattern-differences between the two species. Evidently, the Conepatl has 

 just so much of his back sharply and levelly cut off by white, as, in the aver- 

 age view of the little ground beasts he hunts, at the moments when it most 

 profits him to be concealed from them, would show above the (unbroken) 

 horizon. The pattern of the common eastern skunk renders the same serv- 

 ice, but with the difference that it represents a sky-line notched by trees, 

 etc., as we have seen. The Teledu of Java is marked much like the Cone- 

 patl, though its white 'blanket' is narrower. Other beasts with more or less 

 nearly the same habits, and the same general system of sky-picturing, are 

 the Ratels {Mellivora capensis and M. indica), the Wolverine or Glutton 

 (Gulo luscus) in some pelages, the Great Ant-eater (Myrmecophaga jubata), 

 the Tamandua Ant-eater (Tamandua tetradactyld) , and, to some extent, the 

 Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus ur sinus). But most of these beasts have 

 even browner (or grayer) 'white' patterns. Many of them, on the other 



149 



