312 THE WORLD OF LIFE 



CHAP. 



of indescribable charm, which nature's forms and colouring 

 so often gives us, is still farther removed from material uses. 

 Another consideration is, that our ancestors, the Mammalia, 

 derived whatever colour -sense they possess almost wholly 

 from the attractive colours of ripe fruits, hardly at all from 

 the far more brilliant and varied colours of flowers, insects, 

 and birds. But the colours of wild fruits, which have been 

 almost entirely developed for the purpose of attracting 

 birds to devour them and thus to disperse their seeds, are 

 usually neither very brilliant nor very varied, and are by 

 no means constant indications to us of what is edible. It 

 might have been anticipated, therefore, that our perception 

 of colour would have been inferior to that of birds and 

 mammals generally, not, as is almost certainly the case, 

 very much superior, and so bound up with some of our 

 higher intellectual achievements, that the total absence of 

 perception of colour would have checked, or perhaps wholly 

 prevented, all those recent discoveries in spectroscopy which 

 now form so powerful a means of acquiring an extended 

 knowledge of the almost illimitable universe. 



I venture to think, therefore, that we have good reason 

 to believe that our colour-perceptions have not been developed 

 in us solely by their survival -value in the struggle for 

 existence ; which is all we could have acquired if the views 

 of such thinkers as Grant Allen and Professor Haeckel 

 represent the whole truth on this subject. They seem, on 

 the other hand, to have been given us with our higher 

 aesthetic and moral attributes, as a part of the needful 

 equipment of a being whose spiritual nature is being 

 developed, not merely to satisfy material needs, but to fit 

 him for a higher and more enduring life of continued 

 progress. 



Colours of Fruits : a Suggestion as to Nuts 



As flowers have been developed through insects, so have 

 edible fruits been developed and coloured so that birds may 

 assist in the dispersal of their seeds ; while inedible fruits 

 have acquired endlessly varied hooks or sticky exudations in 

 order that they may attach themselves to the fur of quad- 

 rupeds or the feathers of birds, and thus obtain extensive 



