238 THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 



or for beauty is of little consequence; the important 

 thing is that a choice is made. 



Wallace's further deductions from the arts of dan- 

 cing, flying, and singing will not detain us long. It is 

 pretty well established that bird songs are inherited, gen- 

 erally speaking, and it seems quite as certain, if not more 

 so, that characteristic dances and skill in flight have the 

 same origin. Hudson says : " But every species or 

 group of species has its own inherited form or style of 

 performance ; and however rude or irregular this may be, 

 . . . that is the form in which the feeling will always 

 be expressed." * 



If this is true, mere surplus energy in the individual 

 can not explain it. Of course the Lamarckian theory 

 has no trouble with it. Its advocates can say with 

 Hudson, " If all men had agreed at some period of 

 race history to express the joyful excitement which now 

 has such varied manifestation, by dancing a minuet, 

 and if this dance had finally become instinctive, men 

 would be in the same case that animals are in now."f 

 But Wallace is very sceptical about the inheritance of 

 acquired characters, and takes special pains to refer 

 instinct finally to natural selection.^ Whoever agrees 

 with him in this must cast aside his Spencerian theory 

 of courtship, for it stands or falls with the Lamarckian 

 principle. Once grant that there is no inheritance of 

 individually acquired habits, and that choice by the 

 female is not influential, then these phenomena, which 

 are of too great importance to the species to be dismissed 

 as a mere discharge of surplus energy, however favour- 



* The Naturalist in La Plata, p. 281. 



f This example is well calculated to show how improbable the 

 inheritance of acquired characters is. 

 X Darwinism, p. 441. 



