ful truthfulness of all these pictures which Nature paints. They are all — 

 whether of bird, beast, fish, snake, or butterfly — not mere approximations, 

 but essentially and typically true. (The reader must excuse the repetition 

 of formulas and phrases calculated to bring home to him a vital but most 

 subtile and illusive truth.) There is sense in the seeming paradox that a 

 good caricature portrait of a man looks more like the man than he does him- 

 self ; and there is far more sense in the equally paradoxical sounding statement 

 that the background-pictures worn by animals exceed their subjects in veri- 

 similitude. For these pictures are not only somewhat caricatured, they are 

 at the same time epitomized, compounded. Caricature oj the average — a seeming 

 contradiction in terms — is a phrase that fits the case. The salient and essential 

 attributes of the pictured scenes have been slightly exaggerated, and cleared 

 of all that is uncharacteristic. Many scenes have been merged into one, but 

 all have yielded only what is typical and essential. A leaf is a leaf, and has 

 nothing to lose by looking ordinarily leaf-like and no more, but a moth is 

 not a leaf, and, if it is to profit by passing for one, it has much to gain by look- 

 ing extraordinarily leaf-like — for so will the marauder's eye, seeking it as a 

 moth, be the more surely balked from detecting it. Intensified qualities 

 of pure leaf-like-ness of aspect no marauder will easily learn to associate with 

 something which is wholly foreign to leaves in its real nature. 



All this being so, is it any wonder that artists should feel keen delight in 

 looking at the disguising-patterns worn by animals? They are, in the best 

 sense of the word, triumphs of art; and in a sense they are absolute, as human 

 art can never be. He who would learn the surely typical color- and pattern- 

 scheme of a particular kind or detail of natural landscape — tree-bark, leaf- 

 strewn ground, or what-not — has only to look at the disguising-costume of the 

 moth or snake or bird or butterfly which habitually has such a background. 

 There he will find it in epitome, painted and perfected by Nature herself. 

 Color and pattern, line and shading, — all are true beyond the power of man to 

 imitate, or even fully to discern. 



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