116 "The Descent of Man" 



faithful confederate, Huxley, was joined by the botanist Hooker, and, 

 after longer resistance, by the famous geologist Lyell, whose 

 "conversion" afforded Darwin peculiar satisfaction. All three took 

 the field with enthusiasm in defence of the natural descent of man. 

 From Wallace, on the other hand, though he shared with him the 

 idea of natural selection, Darwin got no support in this matter. 

 Wallace expressed himself in a strange manner. He admitted every- 

 thing in regard to the morphological descent of man, but maintained, 

 in a mystic way, that something else, something of a spiritual nature 

 must have been added to what man inherited from his animal 

 ancestors. Darwin, whose esteem for Wallace was extraordinarily 

 high, could not understand how he could give utterance to such a 

 mystical view in regard to man; the idea seemed to him so " incredibly 

 strange" that he thought some one else must have added these 

 sentences to Wallace's paper. 



Even now there are thinkers who, like Wallace, shrink from 

 applying to man the ultimate consequences of the theory of descent. 

 The idea that man is derived from ape-like forms is to them un- 

 pleasant and humiliating. 



So far I have been depicting the development of Darwin's work 

 on the descent of man. In what follows I shall endeavour to give a 

 condensed survey of the contents of the book. 



It must at once be said that the contents of Darwin's work fall 

 into two parts, dealing with entirely different subjects. The Descent 

 of Man includes a very detailed investigation in regard to secondary 

 sexual characters in the animal series, and on this investigation 

 Darwin founded a new theory, that of sexual selection. With as- 

 tonishing patience he gathered together an immense mass of material, 

 and showed, in regard to Arthropods and Vertebrates, the wide 

 distribution of secondary characters, which develop almost exclusively 

 in the male, and which enable him, on the one hand, to get the better 

 of his rivals in the struggle for the female by the greater perfection of 

 his weapons, and, on the other hand, to offer greater allurements to 

 the female through the higher development of decorative characters, 

 of song, or of scent-producing glands. The best equipped males will 

 thus crowd out the less well-equipped in the matter of reproduction, 

 and thus the relevant characters will be increased and perfected 

 through sexual selection. It is, of course, a necessary assumption 

 that these secondary sexual characters may be transmitted to the 

 female, although perhaps in rudimentary form. 



As we have said, this theory of sexual selection takes up a great 

 deal of space in Darwin's book, and it need only be considered here 

 in so far as Darwin applied it to the descent of man. To this latter 

 problem the whole of Part I is devoted, while Part III contains a 



