Characters as Adaptive and Specific. 



221 



are those minute changes of cerebral structure on 

 which a pyschological preference for all the refined 

 shadings and many pigments of a complicated 

 pattern must be held ultimately to depend. For this 

 reason, then, as well as for those previously adduced, 

 if any one agrees with Darwin in holding to the 

 theory of sexual selection notwithstanding this ob- 

 jection from the necessary instability of unuseful 

 embellishments, a fortiori he ought to disregard the 

 objection altogether in its relation to useless specific 

 characters of other kinds. 



But quite apart from this consideration, which 

 Mr. Wallace and his followers may very properly say 

 does not apply to them, let us see what they them- 

 selves have made of the facts of secondary sexual 

 characters — which, of course, are for the most part 

 specific characters — in relation to the doctrine of 

 utility. 



Mr. Wallace himself, in his last work, quotes 

 approvingly a letter which he received in 1869 from 

 the Rev. O Pickard- Cambridge, as follows : — 



"I myself doubt that particular application of the Darwinian 

 theory which attributes male peculiarities of form, structure, 

 colour, and ornament to female appetency or predilection. 

 There is, it seems to me, undoubtedly something in the male 

 organization of a special and sexual nature, which, of its own 

 vital force, develops the remarkable male peculiarities so 

 commonly seen, and of no imaginable use to that sex. In as far 

 as these peculiarities show a great vital power, they point out 

 to us the finest and strongest individuals of the sex, and show 

 us which of them would most certainly appropriate to themselves 

 the best and greatest number of females, and leave behind them 

 the strongest and greatest number of progeny. And here would 

 come in, as it appears to me, the proper application of Darwin's 



