Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/321



The general principles of colour development now sketched out enable us to give some rational explanation of the wonderful amount of brilliant colour which occurs among tropical animals. Looking on colour as a normal product of organisation, which has either been allowed free play, or has been checked and modified for the benefit of the species, we can see at once that the luxuriant and perennial vegetation of the tropics, by affording much more constant means of concealment, has rendered brilliant colour less hurtful there than in the temperate and colder regions. Again, this perennial vegetation supplies abundance of both vegetable and insect food throughout the year, and thus a greater abundance and greater variety of the forms of life are rendered possible, than where recurrent seasons of cold and scarcity reduce the possibilities of life to a minimum. Geology furnishes us with another reason, in the fact, that throughout the tertiary period tropical conditions prevailed far into the temperate regions, so that the possibilities of colour development were still greater than they are at the present time. The tropics, therefore, present to us the results of animal development in a much larger area and under more favourable conditions than prevail to-day. We see in them samples of the productions of an earlier and a better world, from an animal point of view; and this probably gives a greater variety and a finer display of colour than would have been produced, had conditions always been what they are now. The temperate zones, on the other hand, have recently suffered the effects of a glacial period of extreme severity, with the result that almost the only gay coloured birds they now possess are summer visitors from tropical or sub-tropical lands. It is to the unbroken and almost unchecked course of development from remote geological times that has prevailed in the tropics, favoured by abundant food and perennial shelter, that we owe such superb developments as the frills and crests and jewelled shields of the humming-birds, the golden plumes of the birds of paradise, and the resplendent train of the peacock. This last exhibits to us the culmination of that marvel and mystery of animal colour which is so well expressed by a poet-artist in the following