THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 231 



and forms, are all to be considered as " wedding gar- 

 ments/^ so to speak. 



But many voices worthy of attention have been 

 raised against this theory of a choice of the most pleas- 

 ing by the female. \Yallace takes the lead in this oppo- 

 sition, and many scientists agree with him either wholly 

 or in part. I may mention Tylor,* Spencer, f TTal- 

 laschek4 Hudson,* Lloyd Morgan. || 



Wallace has expressed his view in various of his 

 works, the most important being the Natural Selection 

 and the Darwinism, that Darwin's assumption of a kind 

 of sesthetic taste in the female governing her choice is 

 as far from the truth as is the assumption that the bee 

 is a good mathematician. But more than that, he main- 

 tains that it is by no means certain that the female 

 makes any choice at all. " Any one who reads these 

 most interesting chapters (in Darwin's Descent of Man) 

 will admit that the fact of the display is demonstrated, 

 and it may also be admitted as highly probable that the 

 female is pleased or excited by the display. But it by 

 no means follows that slight diiferences in the shape, 

 pattern, or colours of the ornamental plumes are what 

 lead a female to give the preference to one male over 

 another; still less that all the females of a species, or the 

 great majority of them, over a wide area of country 

 and for many successive generations, prefer exactly the 

 same modifications of colour or ornament."''' 



* Alfred Tylor, Coloration of Plants and Animals, London, 

 1886. 



t The Origin of Music, Mind, xv (1890). 

 t On the Origin of Music, Mind, xvi (1891). 



* The Naturalist in La Plata, chap. xix. 



H Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence, p. 407. 

 ^ A. R. Wallace, Darwinism, p. 285. 

 17 



