Finn’s Experiments 
The second is that the human animal is not a 
typical one. Husbands and wives are selected 
for mental and moral qualities rather than 
physical ones. The same may, of course, be to 
some extent true of animals, but in these there 
must of necessity be far less variation as regards 
mental attributes. Moreover, the question of 
income is much bound up with human matrimonial 
alliances; a rich man or woman has the same 
advantage in selection as is possessed by an 
animal endowed with more than the average 
physical strength of its species. 
Finn adopted the plan of experiment suggested 
by Prof. Moseley. His apparatus consisted of a 
cage divided into three compartments by wire 
partitions, so that a bird living in one of them 
could see its neighbour in the next compartment. 
In the middle compartment he placed a hen 
Amadavat (Sporeginthus amandava), and in each 
of the other compartments he put a cock bird. 
Under such circumstances, the hen in the middle 
compartment will sit and roost beside the cock 
she prefers. The male amadavat, he writes, in 
The Country-Side, vol. i. p. 142, ‘is in breeding 
plumage red with white spots, and the hen brown. 
The red varies in intensity even in full-plumaged 
birds, and I submitted to the hen first of all two 
male birds, one of a coppery and the other of a 
rich scarlet tint. In no long time she had made 
her choice of the latter bird; the other, I am sorry 
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