Mimicry and Masks: Camouflage in Nature and Art

This book is the first to contribute to the pre-history of camouflage, that is its history before its codification in Evolution Theory in the 1860s and 70s, and military use in World War I. Its history is in fact much older, going back to the zoological writings of Aristotle and observations of mimicry among animals and humans in Homer's Odyssey. Defining camouflage as an adaptive change of appearance or behaviour, this publication starts from the fact that this is a very common phenomenon ...