' ig2o J Townsend, Courlship in Birds. ooo 



The motives of display of color, dance and song are easily under- 

 stood, for in one form or another they have all been used in human 

 courtship. The likenesses are fundamental and extend from the 

 lowest to the highest in the human species, but are most strikingly 

 seen in the lowest, more primitive races. 



Although at the present day and among the highest developed 

 human races the display of bright colors is more marked among 

 the females than the males, it must be remembered that this is a 

 recent development. Only a few generations back the males, 

 instead of wearing black or sombre clothing, were as brilliantly 

 apparelled as the females, and among savages it is the male that 

 is strikingly bedecked with feathers, tatoo markings and paint, 

 while the female is quiet enough in her apparel or lack of apparel. 

 The tendency of the highly civilized male to revert to brilliant 

 display of clothing is shown in his fondness for military finery and 

 for striking colors when he is freed from the restraining hand of 

 convention, as witness the cow-boy and the sportsman. 



In both bird and man the display of bright colors and attractive 

 patterns, the dance and the song, even if of courtship origin and 

 competitive in character, may lose the conscious sexual side and 

 be continued at other times for mere pleasure, in other words the 

 original incentive for display, song and dance may be entirely 

 lost, but that does not seem to me to be any argument against 

 the theory of sexual selection. 



The explanation of the brilliant colors of male birds on a mere 

 physico-chemical basis due to exuberance of vitality, the male- 

 ness of the males, or the stimulation of the hormones in the court- 

 ship season fails to account for the fact that the brilliance of dis- 

 play in this season may occur without the growth of new feathers, 

 but merely by the wearing down of old feathers and the unveiling 

 of concealed patterns. This is true in the case of the Snow Bunt- 

 ing, the Junco and the Chewink, and is strikingly shown in the case 

 of the English Sparrow, where the process goes on all unnoticed 

 at our feet. 



The ultra-concealing-colorationists say that the brilliant colors 

 serve to conceal, but one who has watched Eiders in the north, 

 even though he admits that the green and white and black may 

 match the iceberg and the sea and the rocks, is as sure that the 



