colour sense on the animal integuments.[1] He argues that the colours of insects and birds reproduce generally the colours of the flowers they frequent or the fruits they eat, and he adduces numerous cases in which flower-haunting insects and fruit-eating birds are gaily coloured. This he supposes to be due to the colour-taste, developed by the constant presence of bright flowers and fruits, being applied to the selection of each variation towards brilliancy in their mates; thus in time producing the gorgeous and varied hues they now possess. Mr. Allen maintains that "insects are bright where bright flowers exist in numbers, and dull where flowers are rare or inconspicuous;" and he urges that "we can hardly explain this wide coincidence otherwise than by supposing that a taste for colour is produced through the constant search for food among entomophilous blossoms, and that this taste has reacted upon its possessors through the action of unconscious sexual selection."
The examples Mr. Allen quotes of bright insects being associated with bright flowers seem very forcible, but are really deceptive or erroneous; and quite as many cases could be quoted which prove the very opposite. For example, in the dense equatorial forests flowers are exceedingly scarce, and there is no comparison with the amount of floral colour to be met with in our temperate meadows, woods, and hillsides. The forests about Para in the lower Amazon are typical in this respect, yet they abound with the most gorgeously coloured butterflies, almost all of which frequent the forest depths, keeping near the ground, where there is the greatest deficiency of brilliant flowers. In contrast with this let us take the Cape of Good Hope—the most flowery region probably that exists upon the globe,—where the country is a complete flower-garden of heaths, pelargoniums, mesembryanthemus, exquisite iridaceous and other bulbs, and numerous flowering shrubs and trees; yet the Cape butterflies are hardly equal, either in number or variety, to those of any country in South Europe, and are utterly insignificant when compared with those of the comparatively flowerless forest-depths of the Amazon or of New Guinea. Neither is there any relation between the colours of other insects and their haunts. Few
- ↑ The Colour Sense, chap. ix.
