354 SEXUAL SELECTION: MAN. [Part IL 



who were able to rear to maturity the greater nuniher of 

 cliihlren ? This would be unconscious selection, lor an 

 eliect would be produced, independently of any wish or 

 expectation on the part of the men who preferred certain 

 women to others. 



Let us sujipose the members of a tribe, in which some 

 fomi of marriage was practised, to spread over an unoc- 

 cujjied continent ; they would soon split up into distinct 

 hordes, which would be separated irom each other by 

 various barriers, and still more effectuall)^ by the incessant 

 wars between all barbarous nations. The hordes would 

 thus be exposed to slightly difterent conditions and habits 

 of life, and would sooner or later come to difter in some 

 small degree. As soon as this occurred, each isolated 

 tribe would form for itself a slightly different standard of 

 beauty ; " and then unconscious selection would come into 

 action through the more powerful and leading savages 

 preferring certain women to others. Thus the differences 

 between the tribes, at first very slight, would gradually 

 and inevitably be increased to a greater and greater 

 degree. 



With animals in a state of nature, many characters 

 proper to the males, such assize, strength, special weapons, 

 courage and pugnacity, have been acquired through the 

 law of battle. The semi-human progenitors of man, like 

 their allies the Quadrumana, will almost certainly have 

 been thus modified ; and, as savages still fight for the pos- 

 session of their women, a similar process of selection has 

 probably gone on in a greater or less degree to the present 

 day. Other characters proper to the males of the lower 



" An ingenious writer argues, from a comparison of the pictures of 

 Raphael, Rubens, and modem French artists, that the idea of beauty is 

 not absolutely the same even throughout Europe : see the ' Lives of 

 Haydn and Mozart,' by M. Pombet, Eng. translat. p. 2*78. 



