RECAPITULATION 293 



inated 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 ren- 

 dered 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 ordi- 

 nary 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 ab- 

 horrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at 

 the sting of the bee, when used against an enemy, caus- 

 ing 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 ich- 

 neumonidae feeding within the living bodies of caterpil- 

 lars; or at other such cases. The wonder indeed is, on 

 the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the 

 want of absolute perfection have not been detected. 



The complex and little known laws governing the 

 production of varieties are the same, as far as we can 

 judge, with the laws wtiich have governed the produc- 

 tion of distinct species. In both cases physical condi- 

 tions seem to have produced some direct and definite 



