296 
DARWINISM 
CHAP. 
The term “ sexual selection ” must, therefore, he restricted 
to the direct results of male struggle and combat. This is 
really a form of natural selection, and is a matter of direct 
observation ; while its results are as clearly deducible as those 
of any of the other modes in which selection acts. And if 
this restriction of the term is needful in the case of the higher 
animals it is much more so with the lower. In butterflies the 
weeding out by natural selection takes place to an enormous 
extent in the egg, larva, and pupa states ; and perhaps not 
more than one in a hundred of the eggs laid produces a perfect 
insect which lives to breed. Here, then, the impotence of 
female selection, if it exist, must be complete; for, unless the 
most brilliantly coloured males are those which produce the 
best protected eggs, larvae, and pupae, and unless the particular 
eggs, larvae, and pupae, which are able to survive, are those 
which produce the most brilliantly coloured butterflies, any 
choice the female might make must be completely swamped. 
If, on the other hand, there is this correlation between colour 
development and perfect adaptation to conditions in all stages, 
then this development will necessarily proceed by the agency 
of natural selection and the general laws which determine 
the production of colour and of ornamental appendages. 1 
General Laws of Animal Coloration. 
The condensed account which has now been given of the 
phenomena of colour in the animal world will sufficiently show 
the wonderful complexity and extreme interest of the subject; 
while it affords an admirable illustration of the importance of 
the great principle of utility, and of the effect of the theories 
of natural selection and development in giving a new interest 
1 The Rev. 0. Pickard-Cambridge, who has devoted himself to the study 
of spiders, has kindly sent me the following extract from a letter, written 
in 1869, in which he states his views on this question : — 
“ I myself doubt that particular application of the Darwinian theory 
which attributes male peculiarities of form, structure, colour, and ornament 
to female appetency or predilection. There is, it seems to me, undoubtedly 
something in the male organisation of a special, and sexual nature, which, 
of its own vital force, develops the remarkable male peculiarities so 
eoinmonly seen, and of no imaginable use to that sex. In as far as 
these peculiarities show a great vital power, they point out to us the finest 
and strongest individuals of the sex, and show us which of them would 
most certainly appropriate to themselves the best and greatest number of 
females, and leave behind them the strongest and greatest number of 
