84 How Theories are Manufactured 



or rather how can such beauty be conceived as possible, 

 unless there be somewhere a sense of beauty to re- 

 cognize it ? Of what possible advantage can it be to a 

 Wren to develop a golden crest, unless other Wrens 

 think the feature pretty, when they see it ? And whence 

 came their taste in this regard, a taste that must have 

 been antecedent to the first development, which would 

 otherwise have been useless ? On this point we are not 

 likely to obtain any very clear information, the nearest 

 thing to it which I have succeeded in finding being an 

 assurance that tastes of this sort are due to the creature's 

 " environment," and that, in particular, bright colours in 

 the food on which a species lives, are apt to be as it were 

 reflected, through its tastes, in its plumage. Without 

 diving deeper into the philosophy of the subject, let us 

 see how far facts bear out this theory, and how far it is 

 like the lamp in Christabel all made out of the maker's 

 brain. 



"It is probable," we read in an evolutionary work, 1 

 " that an aesthetic taste for pure and dazzling hues is 

 almost confined to those creatures which like Butter- 

 flies, Humming-birds, and Parrots, seek their livelihood 

 amongst beautiful fruits and flowers." Such an assertion 

 raises many questionings in a mind whose mood is phil- 

 osophic doubt. Do not Bees frequent flowers as much 

 as Butterflies? and the sad-coloured Humming-bird 

 Hawk-moth as much as the Humming-bird? Are the 

 seeding heads of thistles and knap-weeds so very brilliant 

 as to account for the plumage of the Goldfinch? Is 

 not the most lustrous of our British birds, without ques- 

 tion, the Kingfisher, whose diet of minnows and loaches 

 is as unlike as possible to that assigned to the tropical 

 birds whom he so closely approaches ? The Gold-crest, 

 living in dull-coloured fir-trees, and feeding on insects, is 

 robed in green and orange, while the Creeper, amid the 

 same trees and hunting the same quarry, wears the 

 soberest of sober garbs ; the Woodpeckers live much like 

 the Creeper, but dress in the fashion of Parrots, while 

 1 Grant Allen, The Evolutionist at Large, p. 195. 



