C FALLING IN LOVE 



breeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural 

 selection has similarly to exert itself upon a crowd of crdtins 

 and other hapless incapables. But in wide and open 

 champaign countries, where individual choice has free room 

 for exercise, men and women as a rule (if not constrained 

 by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on the 

 whole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders, 

 fresh blood, somebody who comes from beyond the com- 

 munity, to the people of their own immediate surroundings. 

 In many men the dislike to marrying among the folk with 

 whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a 

 positive instinct ; they feel it as impossible to fall in love 

 with a follow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own 

 first cousins. Among exogamous tribes such an instinct 

 (aided, of course, by other extraneous causes) has hardened 

 into custom ; and there is reason to believe (from the 

 universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage 

 by capture) that all the leading races of the world are 

 ultimately derived from exogamous ancestors, possessing 

 this healthy and excellent sentiment. 



In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted 

 that short men, as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men 

 admire little women. Dark pairs by preference with 

 fair ; the commonplace often runs after the original. 

 People have long noticed that this attraction towards 

 one's opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race ; 

 they have not, perhaps, so generally observed that it also 

 indicates roughly the existence in either individual of a 

 desire for its own natural complement. It is difficult 

 here to give definite examples, but everybody knows how, in 

 the subtle psychology of FalUng in Love, there are involved 

 innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which 

 strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form 

 with ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not 



