I am going to start this second volume by comparing the Salt Water Frog experiment he did to see how he may have focused
on it again. In this
volume, Mr. Kemper looks at the skin of frogs. This section of the different book also peaked my interest because it also refers to Mr. Agassiz whose null hypothesis on the origin of Human Beings was that the world completely froze over five times. Further, he proposed that each time this happened, a better homo sapiens sapiens resulted leaving only a small number of the previous lesser persons. This approach drew the Darwin Team into the fray with them and may have triggered Darwin’s search a more metaphysical cause. Without Mr. Agassiz and his earlier theories the world might not ever have heard Charles Darwin . Darwin responded throughout his life to the Agassiz'' older Theories. Actually, Darwin was countering Mr. Aggassiz. Even Mr. Semper takes issue of the Agassiz Teams'' explanation of skin coloration in Salmon. Mr. Semper favored Darwin''s take on this. He applied the Darwin Theories to his frog studies in both books. Under Darwin’s null hypothesis, colors of animals have arisen from either natural or sexual
selection. The skin color origins had directly been due to the effect of light under Agassiz. <---> a frog is also cold blooded which means its body temperature is close the ambient temperature around it. I would rather think that both Agassiz and Darwin were each partly right. Many cold blooded vertebrates sun themselves --- do they sun themselves for heat or do they sun themselves for the net affect of photons, etcetera? The sun puts out several forms of radiation, not all of which is good for frogs. Frog eggs mutate in black light experiments. Black light is ultra-violet. It behooves us to try to understand this because we could loose up to 40% of wild amphibians according to present scientists. Further, I track the increasing absence of green frogs in Indiana over the last few years. Is this the ‘canary of miners, warning us about our own environment again? Mr. Semper also postponed his discussion of colors in animals to a future chapter but I could not find another indexed reference to it in this book. Selection would be favored cause if either of three things increased in a species -- the camouflage of the species to hide it better, or camouflage of the species to conceal its stealthier predation while it’s on the prey or while it’s trying to dazzle, or lure prey. I have seen Bull-Frogs actual prey on water snakes. They blend into their surroundings'' colors. They sit very still. They have a long sticky tongues and large mouths. They actually lunge at their prey. Bull frogs are an invasive species....
This an important book, a biological history book that serves as prism to hear, view, smell, touch and taste the dawn of Darwin''s Origin of the Species, a null-hypothesis.