SEXUAL SELECTION IN RELATION TO MAN 769 \ 



or less amount of change, whenever tlie means of companf / 

 son exist. This follows from unconscioas selection during! 

 a long series of generations — that is, the preservation of the 

 most approved individuals — without any wish or expecta- 

 tion of such a result on the part of the breeder. So again, 

 if during many years two careful breeders rear animals of 

 the same family, and do not compare them together or with 

 a common standard, the animals are found to have become, 

 to the surprise of their owners, slightly different." Each 

 breeder has impressed, as Von Nathusius well expresses it, 

 the character of his own mind — his own taste and judgment 

 — on his apimals. What reason, then, can be assigned why 

 similar results should not follow from the long-continued 

 selection of the most admired women by those men of each 

 tribe who were able to rear the greatest number of children ? 

 This would be unconscious selection, for an effect would be 

 produced, independently of any wish or expectation on the 

 part of the men who preferred certain women to others. 



Let us suppose the members of a tribe, practicing some 

 form of marriage, to spread over an unoccupied continent; 

 they would soon split up into distinct hordes, separated 

 from each other by various barriers, and still more effec- 

 tually by the incessant wars between all barbarous nations. 

 The hordes would thus be exposed to slightly different con- 

 ditions and habits of life, and would sooner or later come to 

 differ in some small degree. As soon as this occurred, each 

 isolated tribe would form for itself a slightly different stand- 

 ard of beauty;" and then unconscious selection would come 

 into action through the more powerful and leading men pre- 

 ferring certain women to others. Thus the differences be- 

 tween the tribes, at first very slight, would gradually and 

 inevitably be more or less increased. 



1* "The Tariations of Animals and Plants under Domestication," vol. ii. pp. 

 210-21T. 



" An ingenious writer argues, from a comparison of the pictures of Raphael, 

 Rubens, and modern French artists, that the idea of beauty is not absolutely 

 the same even throughout Europe: see the "Lives of Haydn and Mozart," 

 by Bombet (otherwise M. Beyle), English translation, p. 2f8. 



