THE FACTORS OP ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 19 



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, culminating 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 Europeans at large, as 

 compared with their remote ancestors. The monotonous 

 chants of low savages cannot be said to show any melodic 

 inspiration; and it is not evident that an individual 

 savage who had a little more musical perception than the 

 rest, would derive any such advantage in the maintenance 

 of life as would secure the spread of his superiority 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 children 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 under Domestication, 

 a remark made by Mr. Darwin, practically implying 

 that among creatures which depend for their lives on the 

 efficiency of numerous powers, the increase of any one by 

 the natural selection of a variation is necessarily difficult. 



Here it is. 

 3 



