ESSAYS 137 



beautiful women, are distinguished for their health, beauty, and physique ; and 

 the fine physique and fine features of the Albanians and Montenegrins may 

 perhaps be explained by similar sexual selection. 



Anyhow, this selection does take place : it would seem to be the only important 

 evolutionary factor in war so far as the physical characters of the present 

 belligerents are concerned, and to make for health, physique, and beauty. 



Health and physique, however, are characters with spiritual consequences, for 

 it is well known that for a mens sana a corpus sanutn is required. It is very 

 possible, too, that the selection will have more specific results than was summarised 

 in the phrase metis sana. 



Men select, as we have said, not only health and physique, but also that subtle 

 something called womanly beauty. Now, sense of beauty and craving for beauty 

 are obscure instincts ; we do not understand their meaning ; but they are also 

 very real and very strong and universal passions, and we cannot doubt that they 

 are factors in the upward moral and biological progress of man, even though we 

 may not subscribe to the dictum : " 'Tis eternal law that first in beauty will be 

 first in might." 



Of course, there is beauty and beauty : the ideal of the Hottentot can hardly 

 be said to make for progress of any kind, and the ideal of the Turk is perhaps 

 largely to blame for the apathy and stupidity of that nation ; but I think it will be 

 found that civilised man is inclined more and more to choose such types of female 

 beauty as are correlated with a beautiful mind and with the more feminine virtues 

 of sympathy, unselfishness, gentleness, motherliness. Every war, therefore, will 

 result in a selection that will do something to set up evolutionary tendencies 

 opposite to its own brutal, truculent, anti-social spirit. 



Verily it is a fool-proof world ! 



It is interesting to note, en passant > that selection of this nature also makes for 

 the differentiation of nations ; for each nation has its own taste in beauty, and this 

 taste, no doubt, has some survival value. 



Wisely did Socrates identify the beautiful and the useful, and wisely does 

 William Watson sing : 



" Beauty, the Vision whereunto 

 In joy, with pantings from afar, 

 Through sound and odour, form and hue, 

 And mind, and clay, and worm, and star, 

 Now touching goal, now backward hurled 

 Toils the indomitable world." 



To sum up, then, any influences of the European war on the racial evolution 

 of English, French, and German nations are probably very unimportant, save the 

 racial results produced by the more stringent selection of women which will- 

 follow the war as a result of the decimation of men. 



"There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will !" 



THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERARY CRITICISM (the Editor). 



In the previous number of Science Progress I quoted the saying of Mr. 

 Theodore Maynard that " for the last twenty years or more poetry has been left 

 by the English to languish in the dungeons of derision," and argued that, in spite 

 of disclaimers, the statement was true. This contempt is of special interest in 



