APPENDIX E 
501 
eros may escape observation. A motionless man, if dressed In neutral- 
tinted clothes, will in the same manner escape observation, even from 
wild beasts, at distances so short that no giraffe could possibly avoid 
being seen. I have often watched game come to watering-places, or 
graze toward me on a nearly bare plain; on such occasions I might 
be unable to use cover, and then merely sat motionless on the grass or in 
a game trail. My neutral-tinted clothes, gray or yellow brown, were 
all of one color, without any counter-shading; but neither the antelope 
nor the zebra saw me, and they would frequently pass me, or come down 
to drink, but thirty or forty yards off, without ever knowing of my presence. 
My ‘‘concealment’’ or “protection” was due to resting motionless and 
to wearing a neutral-tinted suit, although there was no counter-shading, 
and although the color was uniform instead of being broken up with 
a pattern of various tints. 
The zebra offers another marked example of the complete break-down 
of the protective coloration theory. Mr. Thayer says: “Among all the 
bolder obliterative patterns worn by mammals, that of the zebra probably 
bears away the palm for potency.” The zebra’s coloration has proved 
especially attractive to many disciples of this school, even to some who 
are usually good observers; but, as a matter of fact, the zebra’s coloration 
is the reverse of protective, and it is really extraordinary how any fairly 
good observer of accurate mind can consider it so. One argument used 
by Mr. Thayer is really funny, when taken in connection with an argu¬ 
ment frequently used by other disciples of the protective coloration theory 
as applied to zebras. Mr. Thayer shows by ingenious pictures that a wild 
ass is much less protectively colored than a zebra; some of his fellow 
disciples triumphantly point out that at a little distance the zebra’s stripes 
merge into one another and that the animal then becomes protectively 
colored because it looks exactly like a wild ass! Of course each author 
forgets that zebras and wild asses live under substantially the same con¬ 
ditions, and that this mere fact totally upsets the theory that each is 
beneficially affected by its protective coloration. The two animals can¬ 
not both be protectively colored; they cannot each owe to its coloration 
an advantage in escaping from its foes. It is absolutely impossible, if one 
of them is so colored as to enable it to escape the observations of its foes, 
that the other can be. As a matter of fact, neither is, and neither makes 
any attempt to elude observation by its foes, but trusts entirely to vigilance 
in discerning them and fleetness in escaping from them; although the 
