approaching prey. But this view does not appear to me satisfactory. We
have some slight evidence that his beauty may be due to sexual
selection, for in two species of Felis the analogous marks and colours
are rather brighter in the male than in the female. The zebra is
conspicuously striped, and stripes cannot afford any protection in the
open plains of South Africa. Burchell (40. Travels in South Africa,
1824, vol. ii. p. 315.) in describing a herd says, their sleek ribs
glistened in the sun, and the brightness and regularity of their
striped coats presented a picture of extraordinary beauty, in which
probably they are not surpassed by any other quadruped. But as
throughout the whole group of the Equidae the sexes are identical in
colour, we have here no evidence of sexual selection. Nevertheless he
who attributes the white and dark vertical stripes on the flanks of
various antelopes to this process, will probably extend the same view
to the Royal Tiger and beautiful Zebra.
We have seen in a former chapter that when young animals belonging to
any class follow nearly the same habits of life as their parents, and
yet are coloured in a different manner, it may be inferred that they
have retained the colouring of some ancient and extinct progenitor. In
the family of pigs, and in the tapirs, the young are marked with
longitudinal stripes, and thus differ from all the existing adult
species in these two groups. With many kinds of deer the young are
marked with elegant white spots, of which their parents exhibit not a
trace. A graduated series can be followed from the axis deer, both
sexes of which at all ages and during all seasons are beautifully
spotted (the male being rather more strongly coloured than the female),
to species in which neither the old nor the young are spotted. I will
specify some of the steps in this series. The Mantchurian deer (Cervus
mantchuricus) is spotted during the whole year, but, as I have seen in
the Zoological Gardens, the spots are much plainer during the summer,
when the general colour of the coat is lighter, than during the winter,
when the general colour is darker and the horns are fully developed. In
the hog-deer (Hyelaphus porcinus) the spots are extremely conspicuous
during the summer when the coat is reddish-brown, but quite disappear
during the winter when the coat is brown. (41. Dr. Gray, Gleanings
from the Menagerie of Knowsley, p. 64. Mr. Blyth, in speaking ( Land
and Water, 1869, p. 42) of the hog-deer of Ceylon, says it is more
brightly spotted with white than the common hog-deer, at the season
when it renews its horns.) In both these species the young are spotted.
571