370 SEXUAL SELECTION : MAN. Part II. 



— that is, tlie preservation of the most approved indivi- 

 duals — without any wish or expectation of such a result 

 on the part of the breeder. So again, if two careful 

 breeders rear during many years animals of the same 

 family, and do not compare them together or with 

 a common standard, the animals are found after a 

 time to have become to the surprise of their owners 

 slightly different.^^ Each breeder has impressed, as 

 Von Nathusius well expresses it, the character of his 

 own mind — his own taste and judgment — on his 

 animals. What reason, then, can be assigned why 

 similar results should not follow from the lonG:-con- 

 tinned selection of the most admired women by those 

 men of each tribe, who were able to rear to maturity 

 the greater number of children? This would be un- 

 conscious selection, for an effect would be produced, 

 independently of any wish or expectation on the part 

 of the men who preferred certain women to others. 



Let us suppose the members of a tribe, in which 

 some form of marriage was practised, to spread over an 

 unoccupied continent ; they would soon split up into 

 distinct hordes, which would be separated from each 

 other by various barriers, and still more effectually by 

 the incessant wars between all barbarous nations. The 

 hordes would thus be exposed to slightly different con- 

 ditions and habits of life, and would sooner or later 

 come to differ in some small degree. As soon as this 

 occurred, eacli isolated tribe would form for itself a 

 slightly different standard of beauty ; ^' and then un- 



'^ ' The Yariation of Animals and Plants under Domestication/ 

 vol. ii. p. 210-217. 



^" An ingenious writer argues, from a comparison of the pictures of 

 Eaphael, Eubens, and modern French artists, that the idea of beauty is 

 not absolutely the same even tliroughout Europe : see the ' Lives of 

 Haydn and Mozart,' by M. Bombet, English translat. p. 278. 



