Hatchlings raised in the black tank were markedly darker than siblings raised in the white tank. were raised separately in a black and a white tank. A simple experiment was carried out to investigate environmental effects in the determination of colouration in this species. Descriptions in the literature range from yellow, with numerous black spots, to dark olive, grey, brown or near black with irregular darker mottling. Read moreĭorsal colouration in the saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus, is quite variable. The well-known triads often represent contractions or partial realisations of a larger structure. The conclusion is that, at least sometimes, especially in »horsy« contexts, the basic ideology used sets of four symbolic colours linked with the four functions. One, a passage in Revelations that has already been linked with the hypothesis of a fourth function, tells of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, while the other tells of the four differently coloured disguises adopted by Cligés, the hero of an Arthurian romance. social estates (the varnas-the very word varna means »colour«), he concentrates on two passages involving sets of four colours. Having previously argued that the ideology was essentially pentadic rather than triadic, the author here explores the relationship between functions and colours. The standard Dumézilian position has been that the three functions of Indo-European ideology were correlated with the colours white, red and »dark« (green, blue or black, occasionally replaced by yellow).