Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/564

558 supposed cases of the contrary arrangement, any apparent association of "badge" and armament.) In the second place, the coloration of all the members of these groups proves to be the most perfect imaginable concealing coloration, picturing the details in the most exquisitely true colors of the very background against which it is most dangerous for their wearer to be detected (commonly that of their feeding ground). While, on the other hand, apparently no brilliant colors at all are found in any branch of the world of above-ground animal life, either in air or water, where no such colors are typical of any of the animal's backgrounds, no matter how much these animals may need advertising.

The famous black and gold, the supposed blazon of offensiveness, so characteristic of the wasp and bee family, is the utmost picture of the sunlit vegetation which they haunt, with the golden stamens of flowers, the yellow of fruit, and the dark interstices. Were this coloration really such a blazon, why does nature deny it to the hordes of stinging ants that often swarm within a few feet of the wasps, but wear only the comparatively dull tones that match the bark and earth surfaces to which their general lack of wings condemns their lives? (Such red as is found in ants' costumes is a universal detail of the forest débris.)

So ingrained is the time-honored conception that such a creature as a golden-patterned wasp, as he bustles among the flowers, owes his conspicuousness at least in part to his costume, that only actual personal experiment with the laws herein shown can dispel it. Not till naturalists give up collecting records of cases of conspicuousness, and begin to inquire by experiment whether any more procryptic coloration could, under the animal's circumstances, be devised, will they have begun at all the study of this subject. One day's investigation of this kind would greatly astonish them, and they would end by discovering that it is unequivocally the wasp's actions that condemn it to so much visibility, and this in spite of its wearing, as far as they can discover, every available form of concealment-coloration.

As to the supposed warningly colored carnivores, the light-colored marks that are considered as badges are often prominently concentrated upon the animal's face and front top, and in no case equally prominently arranged near his rear. Being always on the creature's sky-lit surfaces, they obliterate him to the eyes of beholders from a lower level, such as the seeing portion of his small terrestrial victims. In doing this they fall into the universal class of concealing coloration. Fig. 12 illustrates this function, and the previous illustrations have shown that this same white, so perfect an auxiliary of the animal's feeding operations, is not, in other views, unfavorable to its concealment.

Let us now find out what traits and habits in these groups do constantly go together. We find among the stench-bearing carnivores, just as among the above insects, that the bright patterns are only found on