\g6 The Descent of Man. Part III. 



attended to, either for use or ornament, it is found after several 

 generations to have undergone a greater or less amount of change, 

 whenever the means of comparison exist. This follows from 

 unconscious selection during a long series of generations — that is, 

 the preservation of the most approved individuals — without any 

 wish or expectation of such a result on the part of the breeder. 

 So again, if during many years two careful breeders rear animals 

 of the same family, and do not compare them together or with a 

 common standard, the animals are found to have become, to the 

 surprise of their owners, slightly different. 18 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-continued selection of the most admired 

 women by those men of each tribe, who were able to rear the 

 greatest number of children? This would be unconscious 

 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, practising some form 

 of marriage, to spread over an unoccupied continent ; they would 

 soon split up into distinct hordes, 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 conditions and habits of life, and 

 would sooner or later come to differ in some small degree. As 

 soon as this occurred, each isolated tribe would form for itself a 

 slightly different standard of beauty ; 19 and then unconscious 

 selection would come into action through the more powerful 

 and leading men preferring certain women to others. Thus 

 the differences between the tribes, at first very slight, would 

 gradually and inevitably be more or less increased. 



With animals in a state of nature, many characters proper to 

 the males, such as size, strength, special weapons, courage and 

 pugnacity, have been acquired through the law of battle. The 

 semi-human progenitors of man, like their allies the Quadrumana, 

 will almost certainly have been thus modified ; and, as savages 

 still fight for the possession of their women, a similar process of 



18 ' The Variation of Animals and French artists, that the idea of 

 Plants under Domestication,' vol. ii. beauty is not absolutely the same 

 pp. 210-217. even tnroughout Europe: see ths 



19 An ingenious writer argues, ' Lives of Haydn and Mozart,' by 

 "rom a comparison of the pictures Bombet (otherwise M. Beyle^ 

 of Raphael, Rubens, «ad modern English traaslat. p. 278. 



