Contributions to the theory of natural selection. A series of essays ... By Alfred Russel Wallace ...

128 MIIMUICRY, ANTD OTHER PROTECTIVE
here enumerated are equally deceptive to them as to
ourselves, then both their powers of vision and their
faculties of perception and emotion, must be essentially
of the same nature as our own —a fact of high philosophical importance in the study of our own nature
and our true relations to the lower animals.
Concltsion.
Although such a variety of interesting facts have
been already accumulated, the subject we have been
discussing is one of which comparatively little is really
known. The natural history of the tropics has never
yet been studied on the spot with a full appreciation
of "what to observe" in this matter. The varied
ways in which the colouring and form of animals serve
for their protection, their strange disguises as vegetable or mineral substances, their wonderful mimicry
of other beings, offer an almost unworked and inexhaustible field of discovery for the zoologist, and will
assuredly throw much light on the laws and conditions
which have resulted in the wonderful variety of colour,
shade, and marking which constitutes one of the most
pleasing characteristics of the animal world, but the
immediate causes of which it has hitherto been most
difficult to explain.
If I have succeeded in showing that in this wide
and picturesque domain of nature, results which have
hitherto been supposed to depend either upon those
incalculable combinations of laws which we term
chance or upon the direct volition of the Creator, are