ESTHETIC EVOLUTION IN MAN. 343 



erations. But, besides this fundamental typical beauty the beauty 

 which consists in full realization of the normal specific form ^.there is 

 another source of personal beauty on which sexual selection may act, 

 and through which it has produced the greater number of its most 

 striking effects. This source may be found in the exercise of tastes 

 otherwise acquired upon relatively unimportant details of form, color, 

 or musical abilities. The taste for bright hues, acquired through the 

 search for food in blossoms, berries, or brilliant insects, may be trans- 

 ferred to the search for mates, so that those mates will be most pre- 

 ferred which happen to vary most from the original typical coloration 

 in the direction of more brilliant hues. The taste for musical sound, 

 implied, as I have elsewhere tried to show on the lines laid down by 

 Helmholtz, in the very structure of the auditory apparatus (at least in 

 birds and mammals), may be exercised in the preference given among 

 birds to the sweetest or the loudest singers. Unimportant ornamental 

 points may thus be constantly developed by continual selection of 

 small gradations, when they do not interfere with the general effi- 

 ciency of the organism, till at length we get such highly evolved 

 aesthetic products as the waving plumage of the bird-of -paradise, the 

 sculptured antlers of the gazelle, and the varied song of the mocking- 

 bird. And since, as Mr. Wallace has shown (he himself believes in 

 opposition to, but I rather fancy in confirmation of, Mr. Darwin's 

 theory), these ornamental adjuncts or faculties are most likely to co- 

 exist with the highest sexual efliciency, it must happen that in the 

 main sexual selection and natural selection will reenforce one another, 

 the strongest and best being always on an average the most beauti- 

 ful, and hence the most pleasing to all possible mates. 



In this way, I take it, a sense of beauty in the contemplation of 

 their own mates must have grown up among all the higher animals, 

 and must have became strongest and most discriminative among those 

 whose mates have undergone the greatest amount of ornamental dif- 

 ferentiation. And as the secondary differences between man and wo- 

 man as to beard, hair, and features, are greater than between the two 

 sexes of almost any other quadrumanous animal, we may conclude that" 

 man's aesthetic appreciation of beauty in his own species has always 

 been very considerable. Of this aesthetic appreciation, the secondary 

 differences in question are at once the proof, the cause, and the effect. 

 For, in the constant action and reaction of heredity and adaptation, it 

 must happen that the greater the original taste, the more will it be 

 exerted in the choice of mates ; and, the more it is exerted in each 

 generation, the greater will be its effects, and the more will the taste 

 be strengthened in all future generations. 



This, then, would seem to be the primitive starting-point of which 

 we are in search. Man in his earliest human condition, as he first 

 evolved from the undifferentiated anthropoidal stage, must have pos- 

 sessed certain vague elements of aesthetic feeling : but they can have 



