BIKDS AND MEN 167 



above the roar of the traffic. One taps with its beak 

 against the window pane. We have forgotten it is already 

 time for their evening meal. 



W. A. W. 



February 9, 1907. 



NOTE. As to the courtship of the pigeons in this letter, 

 it is a very doubtful reading of sexual selection that the 

 females choose the best fighting males. She takes her 

 lover for a kind of compound of qualities the elegance 

 of his display, the boldness of his carriage, the splendour 

 or harmony of his plumage, his vigour and gallantry and 

 general attractiveness. According to Darwin's theory 

 " the females have, by a long selection of the more 

 attractive males, added to their beauty and other attractive 

 qualities." Thus variations towards a greater richness 

 and gaiety in the plumage of male birds have been the 

 result of the amatory preferences of the dull-coloured 

 female. Modern science has boggled over the word 

 " choice," being unwilling to grant the hen-bird so 

 delicate a critical taste as to select her man in virtue 

 of a slight superiority in beauty over his rivals. But 

 there is no difficulty if we substitute emotional appeal 

 for critical selection, and a complex of qualities for a 

 single one. The results are the same the elimination of 

 the unchosen males with less beauty and character (the 

 less fit to the given conditions), and the survival of the 

 males who deserve to survive, and the gradual perfecting 

 of the race. Here is a good example of how elimination 

 often works in brutish, incarnadined nature. The un- 

 successful suitors still live and move and have their being ; 

 it is the offspring their loins will never create which are 

 the losers in the struggle for existence. Selection, in 

 other words, operates reproductively as well as lethally. 

 However we read sexual selection, it is certainly not the 

 right of physical combat which wins the day. The female 

 not only exercises her choice, but her motives are without 

 any question partly psychological. 



