140 Permanence and Evolution. 



colours of animals. On this it may be said, as I 

 have already pointed out, these preferences on 

 the part of female animals extending in the same 

 direction from generation to generation, sup- 

 posing them to be a fact, require to be accounted 

 for like any other characteristic of animal races, 

 and they would seem to run in the teeth of 

 natural selection, which would have developed 

 females with a taste for subfusc and safe 

 coloured males. 



Also it is involved in all the nebulous 

 vagueness of Darwinism generally. If male 

 animals are decorated with colours to us 

 beautiful, evidently this is the result of selection 

 by successive generations of females. If the 

 colours are not beautiful to us, who knows what 

 kind of taste the female animals may have ? If 

 the sexes are coloured almost uniformly, why 

 then characters originally belonging to the male 

 only have been transmitted to both sexes, 

 whereas in other closely allied forms, as near, for 



