342 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



through the senses of sight and hearing. Even among those races of 

 insects, birds, and mammals in which no distinct marks of sexual se- 

 lection exist, I believe the sight of beautiful members of their own kind 

 must necessarily excite pleasurable feelings worthy of being ranked in 

 the aesthetic class. In other words, I believe every croAV must think 

 its own mate beautiful not merely inferentially pleasant, but in the 

 truest sense beautiful. There mx;st be, it seems to me, such an inti- 

 mate correspondence between the needs and the tastes of each species, 

 that the sight and voice of a healthy, normal, well-formed mate must 

 have become intrinsically pleasing for its own sake, as well as indi- 

 rectly for its associations. The nervous centers of each species must, 

 I conceive, be so constructed hereditarily as to answer congenitally to 

 certain typical shapes and sounds often experienced ancestrally, and 

 always with ultimate benefit to the race. Though the emotions re- 

 quire experience of the object to arouse them, when the object occurs 

 the emotions naturally arise. Just as man has special cerebral struc- 

 tures existing, though dormant, even in deaf-mutes for the percep- 

 tion and production of human language, so, I can not but believe, every 

 species of higher animal has special cerebral structures, with special 

 corresponding blank forms of perception, for the intellectual recogni- 

 tion and appropriate emotional reception of its fellows and its mates. 

 These feelings are innate in the sense that they occur sj)ontaneously at 

 sight of the proper objects. When Miranda falls in love at first sight 

 with Ferdinand, the only young man she has ever seen, it seems to me 

 that the poet has truly depicted a genuine psychological fact. At any 

 rate, it is indubitable that, so far as man is concerned, the human voice 

 has certain points of emotional and technical superiority over every 

 other kind of musical instrument, and that the beauty of woman and 

 of the human form is now and must always remain the central stand- 

 ard of beauty for all humanity. 



The heart and core of such a fixed hereditary taste for each species 

 must consist in the appreciation of the pure and healthy typical spe- 

 cific form. The ugly for every, kind, in its own eyes, must always be 

 (in the main) the deformed, the aberrant, the weakly, the unnatural, 

 the impotent. The beautiful for every kind must similarly be (in the 

 main) the healthy, the normal, the strong, the perfect, and the paren- 

 tally sound.* Were it ever otherwise did any race or kind ever 

 habitually prefer the morbid to the sound, that race or kind must be 

 on the high-road to extinction. The more every individual shares the 

 healthiest tastes of its kind, and puts them in practice in the choice of 

 a mate, the more is he or she insuring for descendants a healthy and a 

 successful life whereby it hands on its own sound taste to future gen- 



* This doctrine has been admirably illustrated by Mr. Herbert Spencer so far as re- 

 gards the human species, in his essay on " Personal Beauty," which, though published 

 long before the appearance of the " Descent of Man," really contains the germ of the 

 doctrine of sexual selection. 



