This is not entirely unreasonable, because, while he did not invent camouflage, he was undoubtedly one of the first to write about certain aspects of it, including disruptive camouflage to break up an object's outlines, of masquerade, as when a butterfly mimics a leaf (though here he was anticipated by Bates, Wallace, and Poulton), and especially of countershading.
Literary critic Thomas Pavel argues that the fictional world deserves to be examined on its own terms rather than merely through the lens of mimesis.