PDF - Wallace Online

in PROTECTIVE RESEMBLANCES AMONG ANIMALS 89the colours of the vegetable as compared with the wonderfuldiversity of the animal world. There appears no good reasonwhy trees and shrubs should not have been adorned with asmany varied hues and as strikingly designed patterns as birdsand butterflies, since the gay colours of flowers show thatthere is no incapacity in vegetable tissues to exhibit them.But even flowers themselves present us with none of thosewonderful designs, those complicated arrangements of stripesand dots and patches of colour, that harmonious blending ofhues in lines and bands and shaded spots, which are sogeneral a feature in insects. It is the opinion of Mr. Darwinthat we owe much of the beauty of flowers to the necessityof attracting insects to aid in their fertilisation, and thatmuch of the development of colour in the animal world isdue to " sexual selection," colour being universally attractive,and thus leading to its propagation and increase but;whilefully admitting this, it will be evident, from the facts andarguments here brought forward, that very much of thevariety both of colour and markings among animals is due tothe supreme importance of concealment, and thus the varioustints of minerals and vegetables have been directly reproducedin the animal kingdom, and again and again modifiedas more special protection became necessary. We shall thushave two causes for the development of colour in the animalworld, and shall be better enabled to understand how, bytheir combined and separate action, the immense variety wenow behold has been produced. Both causes, however, willcome under the general law of "Utility," the advocacy ofwhich, in its broadest sense, we owe almost entirely to Mr.Darwin. A more accurate knowledge of the varied phenomenaconnected with this subject may not improbably giveus some information both as to the senses and the mentalfaculties of the lower animals. For it is evident that ifcolours which please us also attract them, and if the variousdisguises which have been here enumerated are equallydeceptive to them as to ourselves, then both their powers ofvision and their faculties of perception and emotion must beessentially of the same nature as our own a fact of highphilosophical importance in the study of our own nature andour true relations to the lower animals.