showed wide variation, no two being alike.  The pumas were for the most part bright red, but some were reddish gray, there being much the same dichromatism that I found among their Colorado kinsfolk.  The jaguarundis were dark brownish gray.  All these animals, the spotted jaguars and ocelots, the monochrome black jaguars, red pumas, and dark-gray jaguarundis, were killed in the same locality, with the same environment.  A glance at the skins and a moment’s serious thought would have been enough to show any sincere thinker that in these cats the coloration pattern, whether concealing or revealing, is of no consequence one way or the other as a survival factor.  The spotted patterns conferred no benefit as compared with the nearly or quite monochrome blacks, reds, and dark grays.  The bodily condition of the various beasts was equally good, showing that their success in life, that is, their ability to catch their prey, was unaffected by their several color schemes.  Except white, there is no color so conspicuously advertising as black; yet the black jaguar had been a fine, well-fed, powerful beast.  The spotted patterns in the forests, and perhaps even in the marshes which the jaguars so frequently traversed, are probably a shade less conspicuous than the monochrome red and gray, but the puma and jaguarundi are just as hard to see, and evidently find it just as easy to catch prey, as the jaguar and ocelot.  The little fawn which we saw was spotted; the grown deer had lost the spots; if the spots do really help to conceal the wearer, it is evident that the deer has found the original concealing coloration of so little value that it has actually been lost in the course of the development of the species.  When these big cats and the deer are considered, together with the dogs, tapirs, peccaries, capybaras, and big ant-eaters which live in the same environment, and when we also consider the difference between the young and the adult deer and tapirs (both of which when adult have substituted a complete or partial monochrome for the ancestral spots and streaks), it is evident that in the present life and in the ancestral development of the big mammals of South America coloration is not and has not been a survival factor; any pattern and any color may accompany the persistence and development of the qualities and attributes which are survival factors.  Indeed, it seems hard to believe that in their ordinary environments such color schemes as the bright red of the marsh-deer, the black of the black jaguar, and the black with white stripes of the great tamandua, are not positive detriments to the wearers.  Yet such is evidently not the case.  Evidently the other factors in species-survival are of such overwhelming importance that the coloration becomes negligible from this standpoint, whether it be concealing or revealing.  The cats mould themselves to the ground as they crouch or crawl.  They take advantage of the tiniest scrap of cover.  They move with extraordinary stealth and patience.