Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/411

Rh drawers, the mysterious wonder in the galleries of our museums, the charm of travellers abroad, and appreciative lovers of nature at home. Very much, when the difficulty of the problem is considered, and especially where the utility of animal disguises and mimicking appearances has been unravelled by the magic wand of "natural selection," or "the survival of the fittest." But very little when we wish to understand the larger element in the phenomena of colour, to which we are, at present, unable to take the initiatory steps of defining its exact purpose in the battle of life. Some colour-development appears to be inscrutable as the green bones in the Mud-fish (Protopterus annectans), and the common Gar-fish (Lepidosteus sp.). As Darwin remarks, in the Hornbill (Buceros bicornis) the inside of the mouth is black in the male and flesh-coloured in the female. In the twelve-winged Bird of Paradise (Seleucides nigricans) the mouth and throat are of a "vivid grass-green colouring," which was seen by Guillemard in the course of feeding, when the bird threw a cockroach in the air and caught it lengthways, At St. Kilda, Mr. B. Kearton describes how on a small ledge of rock in the mouth of a cave "I observed a little patch of brilliant orange colour appearing and disappearing simultaneously with the sound," which that writer was endeavouring to unravel: "it was the open mouth of a Black Guillemot." In the Transvaal, the writer was informed by a poultry fancier of Pretoria that his imported White Leghorns lose the yellow colour of their legs; the young chickens exhibit that colour, but again lose it as they grow older. The body cavity of some Lizards is deep black; the pigmentation does not affect the entire lining of the body cavity, but only a part of it which is sharply differentiated from the rest; the palate of the Ourang-outan is black, that of the Chimpanzee flesh-coloured, with no pigment at all. In the preparatory stages of Lepidoptera there appears to be, as a rule, no relation either in tint or brilliancy of colour between larva, pupa, and imago. But there are exceptions, as in the case of that well- {[sc}