436 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
standards in such cases simply misleads; while thirdly, the 
underlying creed that for every visible effect there must exist 
a cause which is humanly explicable, is untenable. 
A vast percentage of what has been written on this subject 
had better be regarded as poetic. It reads so prettily, a sort 
of romance in natural history that appeals to the lay imagina¬ 
tion—impossible, therefore (the seeds once sown), entirely 
to eradicate from popular belief. The observations of 
humble hunters and field-naturalists count for nothing against 
the pretty imaginings of 
graceful and authoritative 
pens. 
Post scrip t. — While busy 
rewriting this chapter—(pro¬ 
bably for the twentieth time 
during twenty years) — I 
read an American treatise 
on the subject, entitled 
Concealing Coloration in 
the Animal Kingdom , by 
Mr Gerald H. Thayer. In 
America, we know, they 
don’t do things by halves, 
and we have grown ac¬ 
customed to “ big - stick ” 
methods in varied and some- 
“Am I Invisible?” (Purple Heron.) ^ mes use f u l developments. 
This book, however, seemed 
to me to top the summit. I must correct the remark that I 
read it; for at the sixtieth of its 250 odd pages I gently 
laid it aside—asphyxiated by the magnificent audacity of 
its assumptions (in prose and colour alike — lurid colours, 
“ laid on with a trowel ”), and by the nature of what its 
author is wont to mistake for argument. The ultimate 
impression left by perusal of those sixty pages was that, 
beyond the Atlantic, are found men prepared to prove “TO 
ORDER ” any conceivable proposition; and thereat personally 
I left it. Subsequently, however, relief came when I read in 
