little green frog, and the leopard frog, and the pickerel frog, all quite showily marked. So there we are, trying to tabulate Nature when she will not be tabulated! Whether it be the phrase "protective coloration," or the imprint of the environment, with which we seek to capture her, she will not always be captured. In the tropics there are gaudily colored tree-frogs, blue, yellow, striped, frogs — with red bodies and blue legs, and these showy creatures are never preyed upon, they are uneatable. But the old question comes up again - are the colors to advertise their uneatableness, or are they the necessary outcome, and would they be the same in a world where no living thing was preyed upon by another? The acids or juices that make their flesh unpalatable may be the same that produce the bright colors. To confound the cause with the effect is a common error. I doubt if the high color of some poisonous mushrooms is a warning color, or has any reference to outward conditions. The poison and the color are probably inseparable.

The muskrat's color blends him with his surroundings, and yet his enemies, the mink, the fox, the weasel, trail him just the same; his color does not avail. The same may be said of the woodchuck. What color could he be but earth color? and yet the wolf and the fox easily smell him out. If he were snow-white or jet-black (as he sometimes is), he would be in no greater danger.

I think it highly probable that our bluebird is a descendant of a thrush. The speckled breast of the young bird indicates this, as does a thrush-like note which one may occasionally hear from it. The bird departed from the protective livery of the thrush and came down its long line of descent in a showy coat of blue, and yet got on just as well as its ancestors. Gay plumes were certainly no handicap in this case. Are they in any case? I seriously doubt it. In fact, I am inclined to think that if the birds and the mammals of the earth had been of all the colors of the rainbow, they would be just about

as numerous.

The fact that this assimilative coloring disappears in the case of animals under domestication, - that the neutral grays and browns are followed by white and black and particolored animals, — what does that prove? It proves only that the order of Nature has been interfered with, and that as wild instinct becomes demoralized under domestication, so does the wild coloration of animals. The conditions are changed, numberless new influences are brought to bear, the food is changed and is of greater variety, climatic influences are interfered with, multitudes of new and strange impressions are made upon each individual animal, and Nature abandons her uniformity of coloration and becomes reckless, so to speak, not because the pressure of danger is removed, but because the danger is of a

new and incalculable kind - the danger from man and artificial conditions. Man demoralizes Nature whenever he touches her, in savage tribes and in animal life, as well as in the fields and woods. He makes sharp contrasts wherever he goes, in forms, in colors, in sounds, in odors, and it is not to be wondered at that animals brought under his influence come in time to show, more or less, these contrasts. The tendency to variation is stimulated; form as well as color is rapidly modified; the old order is broken up, and the animal comes to partake more or less of the bizarre condition that surrounds it. Nature when left to herself is harmonious; man makes discords, or harmony of another order. The instincts of wild animals are much more keen and invariable than are those of animals in domestication, the conditions of their lives being far more rigid and exacting. Remove the eggs from a wild bird's nest and she instantly deserts it; but a domestic fowl will incubate an empty nest for days. For the same reason the colors of animals in domestication are less constant than in the wild state; they break up and become much more bizarre and capricious.

Cultivated plants depart more from a fixed type than do plants of the fields and the woods. See what outré forms and colors the cultivated flowers display!

The pressure of fear is of course much greater

upon the wild creatures than upon the tame, but that the removal or the modification of this should cause them to lose their neutral tints is not credible. The domestic pigeons and the barnyard fowls are almost as much exposed to their arch enemy, the hawk, as is the wild pigeon or the jungle fowl, if not more, since the wild birds are free to rush to the cover of the trees and woods. And how ceaseless their vigilance! what keen eyes they have for hawks, whether they circle in the air or walk about in the near fields! In fact, the instinct of fear of some enemy in the air above has apparently not been diminished in the barnyard fowls by countless generations of domestication. Let a boy shy a rusty pie-tin or his old straw hat across the henyard, and behold what a screaming and a rushing to cover there is! This ever watchful fear on the part of the domestic fowls ought to have had some effect in preserving their neutral tints, but it has not. A stronger influence has come from man's disrupture of natural relations.

Why are ducks more variously and more brilliantly colored than geese? I think it would be hard to name the reason. A duck seems of a more intense nature than a goose, more active, more venturesome; it takes to the bypaths, as it were, while the goose keeps to a few great open highways; its range is wider, its food supply is probably more various, and hence it has greater adaptiveness and variabil

ity. The swan is still more restricted in its range and numbers than the goose, and, in our hemisphere, is snow-white. The factor of protective coloration, so pronounced in the case of the goose, is quite ignored in the swan. Neither the goose nor the swan, so far as I know, has any winged enemies, but their eggs and young are doubtless in danger at times from foxes and wolves and water animals. The duck must have more enemies, because it is smaller, and is found in more diverse and sundry places. Upon the principle that like begets like, that variety breeds variety, one would expect the ducks to be more brightly and variously colored than their larger congeners, the geese and the

swans.

The favorite notion of some writers on natural history, that it is a protective device when animals are rendered less conspicuous by being light beneath and dark above, seems to me a hasty conclusion. This gradation in shading is an inevitable result of certain fixed principles. It applies to inanimate objects also. The apples on the tree and the melons in the garden are protectively shaded in the same way; they are all lighter beneath and deeper-colored above. The mushrooms on the stumps and trees are brown above and white beneath. Where the light is feeblest the color is lightest, and vice versa. The under side of a bird's wing is, as a rule, lighter than the top side. The