Windows of Love

idea of the sun and planets, with their attendant satellites, not asturned out like manufactured articles, ready made, at measuredintervals, in a vast and deliberate celestial Orrery, but as due to theslow and gradual working of natural laws, in accordance with which eachhas assumed by force of circumstances its existing place, weight, orbit,and motion.

The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making,which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of theuniverse at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to theouter crust of this one particular petty planet of ours. While theastronomers went in for the evolution of suns, stars, and worlds, Lyelland his geological brethren went in for the evolution of the earth’ssurface. As theirs was stellar, so his was mundane. If the world beganby being a red-hot mass of planetary matter in a high state of internalexcitement, boiling and dancing with the heat of its emotions, itgradually cooled down with age and experience, for growing old isgrowing cold, as every one of us in time, alas, discovers. As it passedfrom its fiery and volcanic youth to its staider and soberer middle age,a solid crust began to form in filmy fashion upon its cooling surface.The aqueous vapour that had floated at first as steam around its heatedmass condensed with time into a wide ocean over the now hardened shell.Gradually this ocean shifted its bulk into two or three main bodies thatsank into hollows of the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic,Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by thecooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountainranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still veryvague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and morediverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from thehomogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, withdelightful regularity.

At last, by long and graduated changes, seas and lands, peninsulas andislands, lakes and rivers, hills and mountains, were wrought out byinternal or external energies on the crust thus generally fashioned.Evaporation from the oceans gave rise to clouds and rain and hailstorms;the water that fell upon the mountain tops cut out the valleys and riverbasins; rills gathered into brooks, brooks into streams, streams intoprimaeval Niles, and Amazons, and Mississippis. Volcanic forces upliftedhere an Alpine chain, or depressed there a deep-sea hollow. Sedimentwashed from the hills and plains, or formed from countless skeletons ofmarine creatures, gathered on the sinking bed of the ocean as soft ooze,or crumbling sand, or thick mud, or gravel and conglomerate. Nowupheaved into an elevated table-land, now slowly carved again by rainand rill into valley and watershed, and now worn down once more intothe mere degraded stump of a plateau, the crust underwent innumerablechanges, but almost all of them exactly the same in kind, and mostly indegree, as those we still see at work imperceptibly in the world aroundus. Rain washing down the soil; weather crumbling the solid rock; wavesdashing at the foot of the cliffs; rivers forming deltas at their barred

mouths; shingle gathering on the low spits; floods sweeping before themthe countryside; ice grinding ceaselessly at the mountain top; peatfilling up the shallow lake–these are the chief factors which have goneto make the physical world as we now actually know it. Land and sea,coast and contour, hill and valley, dale and gorge, earth-sculpturegenerally–all are due to the ceaseless interaction of these separatelysmall and unnoticeable causes, aided or retarded by the slow effects ofelevation or depression from the earth’s shrinkage towards its owncentre. Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is,not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue ofsuccessive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slowcontinuous action of causes still always equally operative.

Evolution in geology leads up naturally to evolution in the science oflife. If the world itself grew, why not also the animals and plants thatinhabit it? Already in the eager active eighteenth century this obviousidea had struck in the germ a large number of zoologists and botanists,and in the hands of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin it took form as adistinct and elaborate system of organic evolution. Buffon had been thefirst to hint at the truth; but Buffon was an eminently respectablenobleman in the dubious days of the tottering monarchy, and he did notcare personally for the Bastille, viewed as a place of permanentresidence. In Louis Quinze’s France, indeed, as things then went, a manwho offended the orthodoxy of the Sorbonne was prone to find himselfshortly ensconced in free quarters, and kept there for the term of hisnatural existence without expense to his heirs or executors. So Buffondid not venture to say outright that he thought all animals and plantswere descended one from the other with slight modifications; that wouldhave been wicked, and the Sorbonne would have proved its wickedness tohim in a most conclusive fashion by promptly getting him imprisoned orsilenced. It is so easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundredstrong and he is one weak unit. Buffon merely said, therefore, that ifwe didn’t know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, we mighteasily have concluded (so fallible is our reason) that animals alwaysvaried slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely accumulated,would suffice to account for almost any amount of ultimate difference. Adonkey might thus have grown into a horse, and a bird might havedeveloped from a primitive lizard. Only we know it was quite otherwise!A quiet hint from Buffon was as good as a declaration from many lessknowing or suggestive people. All over Europe, the wise took Buffon’shint for what he meant it; and the unwise blandly passed it by as a merepassing little foolish vagary of that great ironical writer and thinker.

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of his grandson, was no fool; on thecontrary, he was the most far-sighted man of his day in England; he sawat once what Buffon was driving at; and he worked out ‘Mr. Buffon’s’half-concealed hint to all its natural and legitimate conclusions. Thegreat Count was always plain Mr. Buffon to his English contemporary.Life, said Erasmus Darwin nearly a century since, began in very minutemarine forms, which gradually acquired fresh powers and larger bodies,

so as imperceptibly to transform themselves into different creatures.Man, he remarked, anticipating his descendant, takes rabbits orpigeons, and alters them almost to his own fancy, by immensely changingtheir shapes and colours. If man can make a pouter or a fantail out ofthe common runt, if he can produce a piebald lop-ear from the brown wildrabbit, if he can transform Dorkings into Black Spanish, why cannotNature, with longer time to work in, and endless lives to try with,produce all the varieties of vertebrate animals out of one single commonancestor? It was a bold idea of the Lichfield doctor–bold, at least,for the times he lived in–when Sam Johnson was held a mighty sage, andphysical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangeroustouch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had thecourage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield,cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenthcentury, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability thatquadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendantsof a single similar original form, and even that ‘one and the same kindof living filament is, and has been, the cause of organic life.’

The eighteenth century laughed, of course. It always laughed at allreformers. It said Dr. Darwin was very clever, but really a mosteccentric man. His ‘Temple of Nature,’ now, and his ‘Botanic Garden,’were vastly fine and charming poems–those sweet lines, you know, aboutpoor Eliza!–but his zoological theories were built of course upon amost absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no sensible person couldever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius–nothing more; a meredesire to seem clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig oftime has brought around with it! By a strange irony of fate, thoseadmired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza hassurvived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and thezoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fatshoulders and dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to bethe chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological science.

In the first year of the present century, Lamarck followed ErasmusDarwin’s lead with an open avowal that in his belief all animals andplants were really descended from one or a few common ancestors. He heldthat organisms were just as much the result of law, not of miraculousinterposition, as suns and worlds and all the natural phenomena aroundus generally. He saw that what naturalists call a species differs fromwhat naturalists call a variety, merely in the way of being a littlemore distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congenerselsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in manycases one species after another merges into the next on either side ofit. He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man andthe modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-goingand convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Societystill believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin. In onepoint only, a minor point to outsiders, though a point of cardinalimportance to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not

anticipate his more famous successor. He thought organic evolution waswholly due to the direct action of surrounding circumstances, to theintercrossing of existing forms, and above all to the actual efforts ofanimals themselves. In other words, he had not discovered naturalselection, the cardinal idea of Charles Darwin’s epoch-making book. Forhim, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant reaching up tothe boughs of trees; the monkey had acquired its opposable thumb byconstant grasping at the neighbouring branches; and the serpent hadacquired its sinuous shape by constant wriggling through the grass ofthe meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by his suggestivehint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, but in so far alone, hebecame the real father of modern biological evolutionism.

From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles Darwin himselfpublished his wonderful ‘Origin of Species,’ this idea that plants andanimals might really have grown, instead of having been made all of apiece, kept brewing everywhere in the minds and brains of scientificthinkers. The notions which to the outside public were startlingly newwhen Darwin’s book took the world by storm, were old indeed to thethinkers and workers who had long been familiar with the principle ofdescent with modification and the speculations of the Lichfield doctoror the Paris philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work,Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every idea which thedrawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin. The supporters of thedevelopment hypothesis, he said seven years earlier–yes, he called itthe ‘development hypothesis’ in so many words–’can show thatmodification has effected and is effecting great changes in allorganisms, subject to modifying influences.’ They can show, he goes on(if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), that any existingplant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins to undergo adaptivechanges of form and structure; that in successive generations thesechanges continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new habits;that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals changes of the sorthabitually occur; that the differences thus caused, as for example indogs, are often greater than those on which species in the wild stateare founded, and that throughout all organic nature there _is_ at work amodifying influence of the same sort as that which they believed tohave caused the differences of species–’an influence which, to allappearance, would produce in the millions of years and under the greatvariety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount ofchange.’ What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-roomphilosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written sevenyears before Darwin published the ‘Origin of Species.’

The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians beforeDarwin. Here are a few of them–Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates,Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer.Depend upon it, no one man ever yet of himself discovered anything. Aswell say that Luther made the German Reformation, that Lionardo made theItalian Renaissance, or that Robespierre made the French Revolution, as

say that Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin alone, made the evolutionarymovement, even in the restricted field of life only. A thousandpredecessors worked up towards him; a thousand contemporaries helped todiffuse and to confirm his various principles.

Charles Darwin added to the primitive evolutionary idea the specialnotion of natural selection. That is to say, he pointed out that whileplants and animals vary perpetually and vary indefinitely, all thevarieties so produced are not equally adapted to the circumstances ofthe species. If the variation is a bad one, it tends to die out, becauseevery point of disadvantage tells against the individual in the strugglefor life. If the variation is a good one, it tends to persist, becauseevery point of advantage similarly tells in the individual’s favour inthat ceaseless and viewless battle. It was this addition to theevolutionary concept, fortified by Darwin’s powerful advocacy of thegeneral principle of descent with modification, that won over the wholeworld to the ‘Darwinian theory.’ Before Darwin, many men of sciencewere evolutionists: after Darwin, all men of science became so at once,and the rest of the world is rapidly preparing to follow theirleadership.

As applied to life, then, the evolutionary idea is briefly this–thatplants and animals have all a natural origin from a single primitiveliving creature, which itself was the product of light and heat actingon the special chemical constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting fromthat single early form, they have gone on developing ever since, fromthe homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more varied shapes,till at last they have reached their present enormous variety of tree,and shrub, and herb, and seaweed, of beast, and bird, and fish, andcreeping insect. Evolution throughout has been one and continuous, fromnebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to manor elephant. So at least evolutionists say–and of course they ought toknow most about it.

But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not even stop here.Psychology as well as biology has also its evolutionary explanation:mind is concerned as truly as matter. If the bodies of animals areevolved, their minds must be evolved likewise. Herbert Spencer and hisfollowers have been mainly instrumental in elucidating this aspect ofthe case. They have shown, or they have tried to show (for I don’t wantto dogmatise on the subject), how mind is gradually built up from thesimplest raw elements of sense and feeling; how emotions and intellectslowly arise; how the action of the environment on the organism begets anervous system of ever greater and greater complexity, culminating atlast in the brain of a Newton, a Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn. Step bystep, nerves have built themselves up out of the soft tissues aschannels of communication between part and part. Sense-organs ofextreme simplicity have first been formed on the outside of the body,where it comes most into contact with external nature. Use and wont havefashioned them through long ages into organs of taste and smell and

touch; pigment spots, sensitive to light or shade, have grown byinfinite gradations into the human eye or into the myriad facets of beeand beetle; tremulous nerve-ends, responsive sympathetically to waves ofsound, have tuned themselves at last into a perfect gamut in thedeveloped ear of men and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipientcentres have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture flashedby an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed from the sensitivemirror of the retina, through the many-stranded cable of the opticnerve, straight up to the appropriate headquarters in the thinkingbrain. Stage by stage the continuous process has gone on unceasingly,from the jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinitesteps of progression, induced by ever-widening intercourse with theouter world, to the final outcome in the senses and the emotions, theintellect and the will, of civilised man. Mind begins as a vagueconsciousness of touch or pressure on the part of some primitive,shapeless, soft creature: it ends as an organised and co-ordinatedreflection of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part ofa great cosmical philosopher.

Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take topolitics. Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growthof suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, andplants, and animals, and minds, they proceed to show us the exactlyanalogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, andlanguages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, andliteratures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and othershave proved for us, slowly putting off his brute aspect derived from hisearly ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use offire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, theearliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he becamethe Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among thetertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually hisexcited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, thehorse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings inthe woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the bread-fruit, and thecoco-nut. He picked and improved the seeds of his wild cereals till hemade himself from grass-like grains his barley, his oats, his wheat, hisIndian corn. In time, he dug out ore from mines, and learnt the usefirst of gold, next of silver, then of copper, tin, bronze, and iron.Side by side with these long secular changes, he evolved the family,communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monogamous. He built the hut, thehouse, and the palace. He clothed or adorned himself first in skins andleaves and feathers; next in woven wool and fibre; last of all in purpleand fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. He gathered intohordes, tribes, and nations; he chose himself a king, gave himself laws,and built up great empires in Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raisedhim altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew intohieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps,into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. Hisdug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the ‘Great Eastern’; his

boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin andhis wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in thetelephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolutionhas really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctlyhistorical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian,French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth ofthe trireme, the ‘Great Harry,’ the ‘Victory,’ and the ‘Minotaur’ fromthe coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.

The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of allthings, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one wordevolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any othersingle thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, allworking up, though some of them unconsciously, towards a grand finalunified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and theHerschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology,Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology,Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor,Lubbock, and De Mortillet–these have been the chief evolutionaryteachers and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, andthe establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system ofphilosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one manalone–Herbert Spencer. Many other minds–from Galileo and Copernicus,from Kepler and Newton, from Linnaeus and Tournefort, from D’Alembert andDiderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius–had beenpiling together the vast collection of raw material from which thatgreat and stately superstructure was to be finally edified. But thearchitect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned anddesigned the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on therock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the authorof the ‘System of Synthetic Philosophy,’ and none other. It is a strangeproof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among thethousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. areprobably aware that both word and conception are alike due to thecommanding intelligence and vast generalising power of Herbert Spencer.

STRICTLY INCOG.

Among the reefs of rock upon the Australian coast, an explorer’s dredgeoften brings up to the surface some tangled tresses of reddish seaweed,which, when placed for a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly touncoil themselves as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swimabout with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring way from sideto side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with anattentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself intotwo parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a

strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating theweed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queerpipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-knownhippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in amummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums.But the Australian species, instead of merely mimicking the knight on achess-board, looks rather like a hippocampus in the most advanced stageof lunacy, with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spinesflattened out into long thin streaming filaments, utterlyindistinguishable in hue and shape from the fucus round which thecreature clings for support with its prehensile tail. Only a rude andshapeless rough draught of a head, vaguely horse-like in contour, andinconspicuously provided with an unobtrusive snout and a pair of veryunnoticeable eyes, at all suggests to the most microscopic observer itsanimal nature. Taken as a whole, nobody could at first sight distinguishit in any way from the waving weed among which it vegetates.

Clearly, this curious Australian cousin of the Mediterranean sea-horseshas acquired so marvellous a resemblance to a bit of fucus in order todeceive the eyes of its ever-watchful enemies, and to becomeindistinguishable from the uneatable weed whose colour and form it sosurprisingly imitates. Protective resemblances of the sort are extremelycommon among the pipe-fish family, and the reason why they should be sois no doubt sufficiently obvious at first sight to any reflectingmind–such, for example, as the intelligent reader’s. Pipe-fish, aseverybody knows, are far from giddy. They do not swim in the vortex ofpiscine dissipation. Being mostly small and defenceless creatures,lurking among the marine vegetation of the shoals and reefs, they areusually accustomed to cling for support by their snake-like tails to thestalks or leaves of those submerged forests. The omniscient schoolboymust often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of thecommon sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into oneinextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a trebleserpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quiveringsea-wrack. Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and whollyundefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fightnor run away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives upontheir peculiar skulking and lurking habits. Their one mode of defence isnot to show themselves; discretion is the better part of their valour;they hide as much as possible among the thickest seaweed, and trust toProvidence to escape observation.

Now, with any animals thus constituted, cowards by hereditarypredilection, it must necessarily happen that the more brightly colouredor obtrusive individuals will most readily be spotted and mostunceremoniously devoured by their sharp-sighted foes, the predatoryfishes. On the other hand, just in proportion as any particularpipe-fish happens to display any chance resemblance in colour orappearance to the special seaweed in whose folds it lurks, to thatextent will it be likely to escape detection, and to hand on its

peculiarities to its future descendants. A long-continued course of thesimple process thus roughly described must of necessity result at lastin the elimination of all the most conspicuous pipe-fish, and thesurvival of all those unobtrusive and retiring individuals which in anyrespect happen to resemble the fucus or coralline among which theydwell. Hence, in many places, various kinds of pipe-fish exhibit anextraordinary amount of imitative likeness to the sargasso or seaweed towhose tags they cling; and in the three most highly developed Australianspecies the likeness becomes so ridiculously close that it is withdifficulty one can persuade oneself one is really and truly looking at afish, and not at a piece of strangely animated and locomotive fucus.

Of course, the playful pipe-fish is by no means alone in his assumptionof so neat and effective a disguise. Protective resemblances of just thesame sort as that thus exhibited by this extraordinary little creatureare common throughout the whole range of nature; instances are to befound in abundance, not only among beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes,but even among caterpillars, butterflies, and spiders, of species whichpreserve the strictest incognito. Everywhere in the world, animals andplants are perpetually masquerading in various assumed characters; andsometimes their make-up is so exceedingly good as to take in for a whilenot merely the uninstructed ordinary observer, but even the scientificand systematic naturalist.

A few selected instances of such successful masquerading will perhapsbest serve to introduce the general principles upon which all animalmimicry ultimately depends. Indeed, naturalists of late years have beenlargely employed in fishing up examples from the ends of the earth andfrom the depths of the sea for the elucidation of this very subject.There is a certain butterfly in the islands of the Malay Archipelago(its learned name, if anybody wishes to be formally introduced, is_Kallima paralekta_) which always rests among dead or dry leaves, andhas itself leaf-like wings, all spotted over at intervals with weespeckles to imitate the tiny spots of fungi on the foliage it resembles.The well-known stick and leaf insects from the same rich neighbourhoodin like manner exactly mimic the twigs and leaves of the forest amongwhich they lurk: some of them look for all the world like little bits ofwalking bamboo, while others appear in all varieties of hue, as ifopening buds and full-blown leaves and pieces of yellow foliagesprinkled with the tints and moulds of decay had of a sudden raisedthemselves erect upon six legs, and begun incontinently to perambulatethe Malayan woodlands like vegetable Frankensteins in all their glory.The larva of one such deceptive insect, observed in Nicaragua bysharp-eyed Mr. Belt, appeared at first sight like a mere fragment of themoss on which it rested, its body being all prolonged into littlethread-like green filaments, precisely imitating the foliage around it.Once more, there are common flies which secure protection for themselvesby growing into the counterfeit presentment of wasps or hornets, and soobtaining immunity from the attacks of birds or animals. Many of thesecuriously mimetic insects are banded with yellow and black in the very

image of their stinging originals, and have their tails sharpened, _interrorem_, into a pretended sting, to give point and verisimilitude tothe deceptive resemblance. More curious still, certain South Americanbutterflies of a perfectly inoffensive and edible family mimic in everyspot and line of colour sundry other butterflies of an utterly unrelatedand fundamentally dissimilar type, but of so disagreeable a taste asnever to be eaten by birds or lizards. The origin of these curiousresemblances I shall endeavour to explain (after Messrs. Bates andWallace) a little farther on: for the present it is enough to observethat the extraordinary resemblances thus produced have often deceivedthe very elect, and have caused experienced naturalists for a time tostick some deceptive specimen of a fly among the wasps and hornets, orsome masquerading cricket into the midst of a cabinet full of saw-fliesor ichneumons.

Let us look briefly at the other instances of protective coloration innature generally which lead up to these final bizarre exemplificationsof the masquerading tendency.

Wherever all the world around is remarkably uniform in colour andappearance, all the animals, birds, and insects alike necessarilydisguise themselves in its prevailing tint to escape observation. Itdoes not matter in the least whether they are predatory or defenceless,the hunters or the hunted: if they are to escape destruction orstarvation, as the case may be, they must assume the hue of all the restof nature about them. In the arctic snows, for example, all animals,without exception, must needs be snow-white. The polar bear, if he werebrown or black, would immediately be observed among the unvariedice-fields by his expected prey, and could never get a chance ofapproaching his quarry unperceived at close quarters. On the other hand,the arctic hare must equally be dressed in a snow-white coat, or thearctic fox would too readily discover him and pounce down upon himoff-hand; while, conversely, the fox himself, if red or brown, couldnever creep upon the unwary hare without previous detection, which woulddefeat his purpose. For this reason, the ptarmigan and the willow grousebecome as white in winter as the vast snow-fields under which theyburrow; the ermine changes his dusky summer coat for the expensivewintry suit beloved of British Themis; the snow-bunting acquires hismilk-white plumage; and even the weasel assimilates himself more or lessin hue to the unvarying garb of arctic nature. To be out of the fashionis there quite literally to be out of the world: no half-measures willsuit the stern decree of polar biology; strict compliance with the lawof winter change is absolutely necessary to success in the struggle forexistence.

Now, how has this curious uniformity of dress in arctic animals beenbrought about? Why, simply by that unyielding principle of Nature whichcondemns the less adapted for ever to extinction, and exalts the betteradapted to the high places of her hierarchy in their stead. Theptarmigan and the snow-buntings that look most like the snow have for