Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/360

332 lace states his conviction that "long- and short-sightedness, and the various diseases and imperfections to which the eye is liable, may be looked upon as relics of the imperfect condition from which the eye has been raised by variation and natural selection."

Do we not therefore go far beyond the scientific use of the imagination, when, as in the practice now so much in vogue, we not only conclude that every well-established colour and marking, if not advantageous, is certainly not disadvantageous in the struggle for existence, but add the further postulate that they are so by reason that animal vision appreciates them in the same manner as understood by ourselves.

Even among ourselves the power of sight is a variable quantity. Hottentots have been described as possessing keen powers of vision. By the quickness of their eyes they can discover buck and other kinds of game from a great distance; "they are equally expert in watching a Bee to its nest. They no sooner hear the humming of the insect than they squat themselves on the ground, and, having caught it with the eye, follow it to an incredible distance." Lumholtz gives a similar testimony. "The Australian Bee is not so large as our House-fly, and deposits its honey in hollow trees, the hives sometimes being high up. While passing through the woods, the Blacks, whose eyes are very keen, can discover the little Bees in the clear air as the latter are flying thirty yards high to and from the little hole which leads into their store-house. When the natives ramble about in the woods they continually pay attention to the Bees, and when I met Blacks in the forests they were, as a rule, gazing up in the trees. Although my eyesight, according to the statement of an oculist, is twice as keen as that of a normal eye, it was usually impossible for me to discover the Bees, even after the Blacks had indicated to me where they were." Darwin has remarked, as a result of reviewing the evidence on the subject, that savages are generally long-sighted, and quotes Rengger's experience in Paraguay as to repeated observations that Europeans who had been brought up and spent their whole lives with the