Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/439

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ASSIMILATIVE COLOURATION.
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irregular and incised, while they are hardly dentate in marshy stations, when it is called Taraxacum palustre."[1] "Plants growing on chalky soils, when compared with those growing on richer soils, are often more thickly covered with down, which is usually of a white or grey colour. Their leaves are frequently of a bluish green tint, more deeply cut, and less veined, while their flowers tend to be larger and of a lighter tint.... Sea-salt has the general effect on many different kinds of plants of producing moist fleshy leaves and red tints."[2] The Rev. Hamlet Clark records a remark made to him by "one who evidently knew the subject":—"The quality of wine depends always and absolutely on the locality in which the vineyards are cultivated, not on the stock whence the young trees are derived. The same vine which in the South of France produces French wines will, if transplanted to the Cape, produce Cape, to Madeira, Madeira, to Teneriffe, Teneriffe wine."[3] According to Allan Gordon Cameron, "The ground-tint, so to speak, among Old World Deer—genera Cervulus and Cervus—is from brown to black, but unmistakably dark; among New World Deer, on the other hand,—genus Cariacus,—it is a light stone colour, sometimes very light indeed. Before me, as I write, are the antlers of a British Stag and of an American Black-tailed Deer, which to a casual observer exhibit almost the difference in colour between black and white. It seems to me that a contrast of this kind, which is fairly constant in the respective species, cannot be ascribed either to the quality of the fraying post or to the constituents of the blood-stain on the antlers, but must be a specific character of the bone structure, which reacts differently to more or less similar external conditions. Variation in the colour of horns, both in Oxen and Antelopes, seems to point the same way."[4] Moseley was told that the Goats which are wild on the island of St. Vincent, one of the Cape Verde Islands, "have all attained a red colour resembling that of the rocks."[5] As the Rev. H.A. Macpherson remarks, "the colour of Red Deer varies not only with the

  1. 'Experimental Evolution,' pp. 72, 91, 95.
  2. Romanes, 'Darwin, and after Darwin,' vol. ii. p. 207.
  3. 'Letters Home,' p. 90.
  4. 'Field,' January 16th, 1897.
  5. 'Notes by a Naturalist on the "Challenger,"' p. 54.