Music and Dancing in Nature. 287 



together from an immeasurably wider field ; but the 

 principle is the same in both cases, and to what I 

 have written it may be objected that, if, instead of 

 twenty-five, I had given a hundred cases, taking 

 them as they came, they might have shown a larger 

 proportion of instances like that of the cow-bird, in 

 which the male has a set performance practised 

 only during the love-season and in the presence of 

 the female. 



It is, no doubt, true that all collections of facts 

 relating to animal life present nature to us some- 

 what as a " fautastic realm " unavoidably so, in a 

 measure, since the writing would be too bulky, or 

 too dry, or too something inconvenient, if we did 

 not take only the most prominent facts that come 

 before us, remove them from their places, where 

 alone they can be seen in their proper relations to 

 numerous other less prominent facts, and rearrange 

 them patchwork-wise to make up our literature. 

 But I am convinced that any student of the subject 

 who will cast aside his books supposing that they 

 have not already bred a habit in his mind of seeing 

 only " in accordance with verbal statement " and 

 go directly to nature to note the actions of animals 

 for himself actions which, in many cases, appear 

 to lose all significance when set down in writing 

 the result of such independent investigation will be 

 a conviction that conscious sexual selection on the 

 part of the female is not the cause of music and 

 dancing performances in birds, nor of the brighter 

 colours and ornaments that distinguish the male. It 

 is true that the females of some species, both in 

 the vertebrate and insect kingdoms, do exercise a 



