766 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dowment will, on the average, be diminished in posterity — just serving in the 

 long run to compensate the deficient endowments of other individuals, whose 

 special powers lie in other directions ; and so to keep up the normal structure of 

 the species. The working out of the process is here somewhat difficult to fol- 

 low ; but it appears to me that as fast as the number of bodily and mental facul- 

 ties increases, and as fast as the maintenance of life comes to depend less on the 

 amount of any one, and more on the combined action of all; so fast does the 

 production of specialities of character by natural selection alone, become diffi- 

 cult. Particularly does this seem to be so with a species so multitudinous in its 

 powers as mankind ; and above all does it seem to be so with such of the human 

 powers as have but minor shares in aiding the struggle for life — the ajsthetic 

 faculties, for example." 



Dwelling for a momeat on this last illustration of the class of diflS- 

 culties described, let us ask how we are to interpret the development 

 of the musical faculty. I will not enlarge on the family antecedents 

 of the great composers. I will merely suggest the inquiry whether the 

 greater powers possessed by Beethoven and Mozart, by Weber and 

 Rossini, than by their fathers, were not due in larger measure to the 

 inherited effects of daily exercise of the musical faculty by their 

 fathers, than to inheritance, with increase, of spontaneous variations ; 

 and whether the diffused musical powers of the Bach clan, culminat- 

 ing in those of Johann Sebastian, did not result in part from constant 

 practice ; but I will raise the more general question — How came there 

 that endowment of musical faculty which characterizes modern Euro- 

 peans at large, as compared with their remote ancestors ? The monoto- 

 nous chants of low savages cannot be said to show any melodic inspi- 

 ration ; and it is not evident that an individual savage who had a little 

 more musical perception than the rest, would derive any such advan- 

 tage in the maintenance of life as would secure the spread of his supe- 

 riority by inheritance of the variation. And then what are we to say 

 of harmony ? We cannot suppose that the appreciation of this, which 

 is relatively modern, can have arisen by descent from the men in whom 

 successive variations increased the appreciation of it — the composers 

 and musical performers ; for on the whole, these have been men whose 

 worldly prosperity was not such as enabled them to rear many chil- 

 dren inheriting their special traits. Even if we count the illegitimate 

 ones, the survivors of these added to the survivors of the legitimate 

 ones, can hardly be held to have yielded more than average numbers 

 of descendants ; and those who inherited their special traits have not 

 often been thereby so aided in the struggle for existence as to further 

 the spread of such traits. Rather the tendency seems to have been 

 the reverse. 



Since the above passage was written, I have found in the second 

 volume of Animals and Plants vnder Domestication, a remark made 

 by Mr. Darwin, practically implying that among creatures which de- 

 pend for their lives on the efficiency of numerous powers, the increase 



