2o6 Animal Life and Intelligence. 



wind." " The argument in favour of this view," says Mr. 

 Wallace,* who quotes this passage, **is now much stronger 

 than when Mr. Darwin wrote ; " and he cites with approval 

 the following passage from Mr. Grant Allen's " Colour- 

 Sense : " " While man has only tilled a few level plains, a 

 few great river-valleys, a few peninsular mountain slopes, 

 leaving the vast mass of earth untouched by his hand, the 

 insect has spread himself over every land in a thousand 

 shapes, and has made the whole flowering creation sub- 

 servient to his daily wants. His buttercup, his dandelion, 

 and his meadowsweet grow thick in every English field. 

 His thyme clothes the hillside ; his heather purples the 

 bleak grey moorland. High up among the Alpine heights 

 his gentian spreads its lakes of blue ; amid the snows of 

 the Himalayas his rhododendrons gleam with crimson light. 

 Even the wayside pond yields him the white crowfoot and 

 the arrowhead, while the broad expanses of Brazilian 

 streams are beautified by his gorgeous water-lilies. The 

 insect has thus turned the whole surface of the earth into 

 a boundless flower-garden, which supplies him from year 

 to year with pollen or honey, and itself in turn gains 

 perpetuation by the baits that it offers to his allurement." t 

 Mr. Grant Allen is perfectly correct in stating that the 

 insect has produced all this beauty. It is the result of 

 insect choice, a genuine case of selection as contrasted with 

 elimination. And when we ask in this case, as we asked 

 in the case of the beautiful colours and forms of animals, 

 what has guided their evolution along lines which lead to 

 such rare beauty, we are given by Mr. Wallace himself the 

 answer, " The preferential choice of insects." If these 

 insects have been able to produce through preferential 

 selection aU this wealth of floral beauty (not, indeed, for the 

 sake of the beauty, but incidentally in the practical business 

 of their life), there would seem to be no a priori reason why 

 the same class and birds and mammals should not have 

 been able to produce, through preferential selection, aU the 

 wealth of animal beauty. 



* "Dai-win'sm," p. 332. f " The Colour-Sense," by Grant Allen, p. 95. 



