90 HOMO V. DARWIN. 



many forms of beauty that meet the eye among living 

 creatures around us, by what he calls Sexual Selection, he 

 leaves unaccounted for the fact that we find quite as many 

 and as wonderful forms of beauty in the floral world, where 

 Sexual Selection can have no play. For I suppose that 

 flowers, in producing their kind, exercise no preference as 

 to their partners. 



Lord C. From which I suppose you infer that, while 

 Sexual Selection may have something to do in modifying 

 the creatures among whom it comes into play, Mr. Darwin 

 makes too much of it, and attributes to it a power which it 

 does not possess. 



Homo. That is precisely what I think, my Lord. I do 

 not believe that Sexual Selection, even with the aid of 

 Natural Selection, could have raised, from the tadpole 

 ofi'spring of a worm, the forms of beauty which meet the 

 eye everywhere in the world of living things around us — 

 among insects, fishes, birds, reptiles, and mammals. 



Lord C. I suppose the next point that claims attention 

 is the mental and moral powers possessed by man, and the 

 seemingly impassable gulf fixed, by his possessing those 

 powers, between him and the lower animals. How does 

 Mr. Darwin treat this part of his subject ? 



Homo. Most unsatisfactorily, my Lord. We might expect 

 that, in attempting, as he does, to prove that the mental 

 powers of man and animals are the same in Tcind^ and differ 

 only in respect of development, he would begin by giving 

 us a minute and careful analysis of those powers. He does 

 not seek even so far to enlighten us. Without having 

 kindled any torch to guide either himself or his readers, he 

 heedlessly plunges into what men of the highest intellect 

 have always felt to be a great and mysterious deep, to be 

 explored, therefore, with awe and reverence. He manages, 



