64 THE DESCENT OF MAN. Part I. 



of their male partners, all the labour and anxiety exhi- 

 bited by them in displaying their charms before the 

 females would have been thrown away ; and this it is 

 impossible to admit. Why certain bright colours and 

 certain sounds should excite pleasure, when in harmony, 

 cannot, I presume, be explained any more than why 

 certain flavours and scents are agreeable ; but assuredly 

 the same colours and the same sounds are admired by 

 us and by many of the lower animals. 



The taste for the beautiful, at least as far as female 

 beauty is concerned, is not of a special nature in the 

 human mind ; for it differs widely in the different 

 races of man, as will hereafter be shewn, and is not 

 quite the same even in the different nations of the 

 same race. Judging from the hideous ornaments and 

 the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it 

 might be urged that their aesthetic faculty was not so 

 highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in 

 birds. Obviously no animal would be capable of ad- 

 miring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful 

 landscape, or refined music; but such high tastes, de- 

 pending as they do on culture and complex associa- 

 tions, are not enjoyed by barbarians or by uneducated 

 persons. 



Many of the faculties, which have been of inesti- 

 mable service to man for his progressive advance- 

 ment, such as the powers of the imagination, wonder, 

 curiosity, an undefined sense of beauty, a tendency 

 to imitation, and the love of excitement or novelt , 

 could not fail to have led to the most capricious 

 changes of customs and fashions. I have alluded to 

 this point, because a recent writer 50 has oddly fixed 

 on Caprice " as one of the most remarkable a d 



50 • The Spectator,' Dec. 4th, 1869, p. 1430. 



