260 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
even among the human animals, in which we recognise far 
greater differences of beauty than we do among beasts and 
birds. Indeed, so little does this prevail that it 1s very 
difficult to say that it has improved the beauty of mankind in 
any known period. Itis true that civilised men and women 
are, on the average, much handsomer than savages; but it is 
a great deal too uncertain that the civilised and handsome 
races have risen from savages, and ugly ones, to build any 
conclusion on that as a fact. All our experience is that 
savages die out when they come in contact with the superior 
races; and, I believe, absolutely none that they improve. The 
experience of all the known history of mankind, including the 
supposed oldest skeletons, exhibits very much less than one 
would expect in the way of improvement in beauty by natural 
selection or survival of the best, seeing how quickly careful 
breeding does produce its effectsin animals. In some respects 
there is no longer any doubt that both we and the French 
have reached and passed our climax physically, and I suspect, 
intellectually too; for learning is not genius, which is becoming 
rarer in every direction. Yet our circumstances, and condition, 
and means of cultivating beauty had certainly increased, until 
a few years ago, at any rate, before universal poverty set in 
among the classes most likely to do the best for themselves 
in breeding. 
This absence of evidence of general improvement in human 
beauty within the longest known period is still more awkward, 
because men are evidently more likely than beasts to avail 
themselves of opportunities for judicious selection. And 
again I say of them, as of the flower theory, that if the 
evidence were a hundred times better than it is, it would do 
absolutely nothing towards accounting for the infinity of 
beauty of everything with no life as high as that of loco- 
motive animals; for locomotion is evidently a necessary 
element in selection, and some Jow animals are not locomotive. 
Another awkward fact is that the beasts most like us are, 
nevertheless, by general consent the ugliest. If, on the other 
hand, it is contended that apes have a standard of beauty of 
their own, and choose their mates accordingly, as savages 
probably have, then it follows that we must dismiss all 
animals from this discussion, and of course insects with 
them, and treat each species as having its own taste. And 
then I am afraid we shall be driven to ask how it is that an 
undoubted majority of every nation with our known taste is 
rather ugly than handsome? In any case it is an odd result 
of the theory of improvement by natural selection,,that our 
nearest neighbours, the apes, and ourselves present the largest 
