THE ZOOLOGIST
No. 697.— July, 1899.
BIOLOGICAL SUGGESTIONS.
MIMICRY.
By W. L. Distant.
Part I.
"Evidence has three degrees of force: demonstration, probability, plausibility."—Matthew Arnold.
"The essence of originality is not that it be new."—Carlyle.
"Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself."—Emerson.
If, as we have before suggested, our only clue to the original, or even primitive, colouration of animals is lost and buried in the records of the geological past, in which we find structure—scantily and often confined to typical portions—but of colour nothing,[1] a much larger field is open to the palaeontologist who seeks for the origin of that animal structure which is so often alike described under the terms of "protective resemblance" and "mimicry." Friends and foes of those theories too frequently—both for attack and defence—conceive the wonderful protective disguises in nature as having been evolved during the time of present
- ↑ In the years to come, when we shall be estimated only as advanced teleologists, science may probably have solved the problem of animal colouration. When that is effected, who dare say that the inductive process will be unable to exhibit the long past in varied and tinted landscape on the walls of the museum, where now osteology only holds her cold and partial sway?
