Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/24

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At the last meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union, in Washington, some forty naturalists looked in broad daylight straight at a small stuffed deer that wore from its dorsal line down its sides two white stripes in imitation of those of certain African antelopes. These stripes were in every respect such as Theodore Roosevelt says have no concealing virtue of any kind whatsoever. Yet they so completely concealed this deer in an almost clean-shorn public park that although for each of the forty spectators I pointed straight at the deer only ten yards away, not one of them detected it. The animal was placed just above the eye-level of the spectator, exactly as African antelopes would be above that of the creeping lions or leopards. And, exactly as would commonly be the case with the antelopes, the white stripes absolutely counterfeited the glimpses of the sky-background seen through the thin half leafless bush that intervened. When the white stripes were removed the spectators exclaimed at how clearly one