662 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



marks of useful properties, we do not admire white cheeks, which are 

 the external mark of weakness or ansemia. Similarly, our idea of 

 beauty demands that the figure should neither be too fat nor too thin, 

 but should possess that graceful development of all the muscles which 

 is the outward symbol of ability to move and act with ease and effect. 

 If any large number of persons were ever actuated by opposite tastes, 

 if they preferred pale cheeks and lips to rosy ones, thin and haggard 

 faces to full and rounded ones, weak and angular limbs to strong and 

 graceful ones, a flat and undeveloped chest to a fine and healthy bust, 

 then they and their taste must rapidly die out through the inferior 

 physique they would hand on to their descendants. And as every 

 individual is himself the product of countless thousands of prior indi- 

 viduals, all of whom have been in the main successful in the struggle 

 for life and the search for mates, it must follow that he will have 

 inherited from them, on the average, a healthy taste for that particular 

 arrangement of limbs and features which best suits the essential con- 

 ditions of the species. Not, of course, that he will consciously recog- 

 nize this fact in most cases ; but the mere presentation of such a typi- 

 cal combination will instinctively rouse in him, through the organized 

 correlation of nervous centers, the hereditary feeling of beauty. Hence 

 this feeling will probably be most strongly aroused in each species by 

 the sight of the sex which in that species has undergone the greatest 

 differentiation through sexual selection : just as we know that the feel- 

 ing is most strongly aroused in mankind by the beauty of woman. 

 On the other hand, we are still able to perceive, when we look at a 

 peacock or a humming-bird, that, thought his specific hereditary feeling 

 is absent, yet the strength of the purely abstract elements color, bril- 

 liancy, symmetry, form, and minute workmanship is so unusually 

 great that we have no hesitation in pronouncing them also beautiful 

 after their kind. 



If, then-, we admit the reality and potency of sexual selection, in 

 however modified a form, it must follow that birds, being on the whole 

 the most ornamental of all classes in the animal world, are also the 

 most aesthetic, with the exception of man. It might, at first sight, 

 seem that consistency would demand the sacrifice even of this excep- 

 tion ; but a moment's reflection will disclose an important difference 

 between the two cases. Man possesses the active power of direct 

 artistic creation ; the birds only possess the passive power of selection 

 from among the forms produced for them by Nature. The ordinary 

 workman who selects his wife partly or wholly on the ground of beauty, 

 thereby does something toward perpetuating and improving the beauty 

 of the race ; he stamps the impress of his taste upon future genera- 

 tions ; but such mere passive choice differs widely from the ability to 

 depict or create on canvas such a beautiful woman. In this way, the 

 actual loveliness of birds may lead us somewhat to over-estimate their 

 aesthetic sensibility ; for, though within their own species they may be 



