SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERS. 681 



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 cer- 

 tain women to others. 



Let us suppose the members of a tribe, practicing som& 

 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 effectu- 

 ally 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;* and then unconscious selection would 

 come into action through the more powerful and leading 

 men preferring certain women to others. Thus the dif- 

 ferences 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 Q.uadrumana, will almost certainly have 

 been thus modified; and, as savages still fight for the pos- 

 session of their women, a similar process of selection has 

 probably gone on in a greater or less degree to the present 

 day. Other characters proper to the males of the lower 

 animals, such as bright colors and various ornaments, have 

 been acquired by the more attractive males having bee-, 

 preferred by the females. There are, however, exceptiouid 

 cases in which the males are the selectors, instead of having 

 been the selected. We recognize such cases by the females 

 being more highly ornamented than the males their orna- 

 mental characters having been transmitted exclusively or 



* An ingenious writer argues, from a comparison of the pictures of 

 Raphael, Rubens, and modern French artists, that the idea of beauty 

 is not absolutely the same even throughout Europe; see the " Lives 

 of Haydn and Mozart," by Bom bet (otherwise M. Beyle), English 

 trauslat. , p. 278. 



