mber of other magnificent things with
the same facility from the mists of the unknown, I should not be sorry
to hear what they have to say of the Melecta, the Crocisa and the
Anthrax and of the origin of their exceptional costume.

The word 'mimesis' has been invented for the express purpose of
designating the animal's supposed faculty of adapting itself to its
environment by imitating the objects around it, at least in the matter
of colouring. We are told that it uses this faculty to baffle its foes,
or else to approach its prey without alarming it. Finding itself the
better for this dissimulation, a source of prosperity indeed, each race,
sifted by the struggle for life, is considered to have preserved those
best-endowed with mimetic powers and to have allowed the others to
become extinct, thus gradually converting into a fixed characteristic
what at first was but a casual acquisition. The Lark became
earth-coloured in order to hide himself from the eyes of the birds of
prey when pecking in the fields; the Common Lizard adopted a grass-green
tint in order to blend with the foliage of the thickets in which he
lurks; the Cabbage-caterpillar guarded against the bird's beak by taking
the colour of the plant on which it feeds. And so with the rest.

In my callow youth, these comparisons would have interested me: I was
just ripe for that kind of science. In the evenings, on the straw of the
threshing-floor, we used to talk of the Dragon, the monster which,
to inveigle people and snap them up with greater certainty, became
indistinguishable from a rock, the trunk of a tree, a bundle of twigs.
Since those happy days of artless credulity, scepticism has chilled my
imagination to some extent. By way of a parallel with the three examples
which I have quoted, I ask myself why the White Wagtail, who seeks his
food in the furrows as does the Lark, has a white shirt-front surmounted
by a magnificent black stock. This dress is one of those most easily
picked out at a distance against the rusty colour of the soil. Whence
this neglect to practise mimesis, 'protective mimicry'? He has every
need of it, poor fellow, quite as much as his companion in the fields!

Why is the Eyed Lizard of Provence as green as the Common Lizard,
considering that he shuns verdure and chooses as his haunt, in the
bright sunlight, some chink in the naked rocks where not so much as a
tuft of moss grows? If, to capture his tiny prey, his brother in the
copses