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Updated: June 12, 2025
Noctuidae, coloration of. Nomadic habits, unfavourable to human progress. Nordmann, A., on Tetrao urogalloides. Norfolk Island, half-breeds on. Norway, numerical proportion of male and female births in. Nose, resemblance of, in man and the apes; piercing and ornamentation of the; very flat, not admired in negroes; flattening of the.
No one has yet shown any principles which will better explain the great color scheme of the animal world, and until such explanation is forthcoming I believe it will not be wise for us to discard the idea of protective coloration. No doubt it has been overworked by enthusiastic believers in its efficiency. At the same time, to overlook it completely, is, I believe, to make a greater error.
This protective coloration of plumage is possessed by the females of many species of birds, which would be very conspicuous, and of course greatly liable to danger while incubating their eggs, if they wore the bright tints of the males. The tanager and indigo-bird afford prominent examples.
He could always mix with and become one of the crowd. He would have laughed at any such foolish phrase as "protective coloration." Yet seldom, he knew, men turned back to look at him a second time. Small-eyed, beefy and well-fed, he could have passed, under his slightly tilted black boulder, as a truck driver with a day off.
If any one will examine the exquisite shapes and gradations of color which are exhibited in the tail of the peacock, or of the lyre-bird, or even the coloration of the game-cock, he may perhaps imagine how prodigious must be the development of the æsthetic sense in these species, in order that it may take account of every little betterment which leads towards more perfect beauty.
The lower animals appear to be guided in the choice of a mate by externals of a striking and obvious sort. And men and women to this day marry more with their eyes than with their heads. The coloration of man, however, though it may have come to subserve the purposes of mating, does not seem in its origin to have been like the bright coloration of the male bird.
If the butterflies are of different sex, the males as a rule exhibit a more developed stage of design and color than the females. These frequently present on the upper side the stage of coloration, which the males present on the lower side, while the upper side of the males is one stage in advance.
Let us abridge this dry subject; let us be content with these few data, which could if necessary be corroborated by many others. What does the little that we have learnt teach us? It tells us that the materials rejected by the organism, guanine, uric acid and other dross from life's refinery, play an important part in the coloration of the insect.
When the downy young are hatched they, too, are almost invisible. They cunningly lie motionless, though within a few inches of your hand, and remain perfectly passive when lifted. Snoodling beside lumps of coral or beneath weather-beaten drift-wood, they afford startling proof of the effect of sympathetic coloration.
The females of these nine species resemble each other in their general type of coloration; and they likewise resemble both sexes of the species in several allied genera found in various parts of the world. Hence we may infer that these nine species, and probably all the others of the genus, are descended from an ancestral form which was coloured in nearly the same manner.
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