( 553 ) XXVI. Protective Coloration in its relation to Mimicry, Common Warning Colours, and Sexual Selection. By Abbott H. Thayer. Communicated by Prof. Edward B.Poulton,M.A.,D.Sc., F.R.S. [Read October 21st, 1903.] The following paper records an artist's examination of the principles of butterflies' coloration, and shows how the results tend to restrict the fields heretofore claimed for Mimicry and Common Warning Colours, and to place them on a basis of Concealing Coloration. It contains also several arguments tending to restrict the hypothesis of Sexual Selection. It does not attack the obvious fact that every possible form of advantageous adaptation must somewhere exist. It is obvious to its writer that there must be unpalata-bility accompanied by Warning Coloration, — as apparently in the cases of the Hornbills and Wood Hoopoes reported by Mr. Frank Finn, and probably in many Corvidse, for instance, — and equally plain that there must be Mimicry, both Batesian and MuUerian. Yet every case demands special examination, for the reasons that I shall show herein ; and no apparent conspicuousness of coloration is sure to prove such when examined on the principles established in this article. First, it seems necessary to establish the artist's claim to be the judge of all matters of visibility, and the effect, upon the mind, of all patterns, designs, and colours. If even the artist is limited in this, his own field, what hope is there for others ? Fullest wisdom on the part of naturalists would make them adjourn all matters of animals' appearance to us artists, just as any wise ruler gathers about him the most highly specialized minds, to widen, through them, his own scope. An artist reads design wherever it occurs, just as a composer reads a score, without playing it, or hearing it. He perceives that every juxtaposition of spots, or shapes, or colours, or of dark and light, and of degrees of these, TRANS. ENT. SOC. LOND. 1903. — PART IV. (DEC.)
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