488 BEGAPirULATION. 



natural selection always ready to adapt the slowly varying 

 descendants of each to any unoccupied or ill-occupied place 

 la nature, these facts cease to bs strange, or might even 

 have been anticipated. 



We can to a certain extent understand how it is that 

 there is so much beauty throughout nature; for this may 

 be largely attributed to the agency of selection. That 

 beauty, according to our sense of it, is not universal, must 

 be admitted by every one who will look at some venomous 

 snakes, at some fishes, and at certain hideous bats with a 

 distorted resemblance to the human face. Sexual selection 

 has given the most brilliant colors, elegant patterns, and 

 other ornaments to the males, and sometimes to b^th sexes 

 of many birds, butterflies and other animals. With birds 

 it has often rendered the voice of the male musical to the 

 female, as well as to our ears. Flowers and fruit have 

 been rendered conspicuous by brilliant colors in contrast 

 with the green foliage, in order that the flowers may be 

 easily seen, visited and fertilized by insects, and the seeds 

 disseminated by birds. How it comes that certain colors, 

 sounds and forms should give pleasure to man and the 

 lower animals, that is, how the sense of beauty in its 

 simplest form was first acquired, we do not know any 

 more than how certain odors and flavors were first rendered 

 agreeable. 



As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts and 

 improves the inhabitants of each country only in relation 

 to their co-inhabitants; so that we need feel no surprise at 

 the species of any one country, although on the ordinary 

 view supposed to have been created and specially adapted 

 for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the 

 naturalized productions from another land. Nor ought 

 we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as 

 far as we can judge, absolutely perfect, as in the case even 

 of the human eye; or if some of them be abhorrent to our 

 ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the stins: of the 

 bee, when used against an enemy, causing the bee's own 

 death; at drones being produced in such great numbers 

 for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their 

 sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our 

 fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen-bee for her 

 own fertile daughters; at ichueumonidee feeding within the 



