244 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



weapons in female ruminants, there is the logical, yet sufficient, 

 objection (1) that we have no evidence in support of the explana- 

 tion other than the facts which it is framed to explain ; and (2) 

 that in the explanation itself we invoke an unknown force which 

 really adds a greater puzzle to a less. Horned and hornless 

 females occur not only among genera constituting families, and 

 among species constituting genera, but even among individuals 

 constituting species, which occupy the same area of distribu- 

 tion and are subject to similar conditions of life. Horned 

 females, moreover, exhibit horns, as Darwin pointed out, in 

 every stage of a graduated series, from those which are of 

 equal calibre with the male weapons, to those which are of 

 lesser calibre, to those which are rudimentary, to those which 

 are disappearing. In ascribing all such cases to distinct forms 

 of inheritance acting concurrently yet indefinitely in the alter- 

 nate transference or non-transference of masculine characters 

 without regard to use or purpose, we enter a region of speculation 

 which betrays the weak point of our hypothesis.* 



Apart, however, from any question of sex or structure, the 

 derivation of frontal weapons through sexual selection rests upon 

 a fundamental error of fact in taking too easily for granted, that 

 the possession of the female depends upon the calibre of the 

 horns or antlers of the male, or upon the presence of such 

 weapons at all — even in those species which normally exhibit 

 them highly specialised. Unquestionably among existing rumi- 

 nants, whether horned or antlered, the rights of the harem are 

 governed by the law of battle : but the law of battle is the law of 

 the prize-ring — that the fortune of war favours the heavy weight, 

 and the science of sexual warfare is the primitive science of the 

 battering-ram, which decides the issue in the clash of skulls by 

 the force of impact, and by the pressure of bodily weight behind 

 it, irrespective of the calibre of the weapon. It is a common 

 experience with British stock-breeders that the lighter horned 

 breeds of sheep and cattle are not a match for their heavier 

 hornless congeners ; and the carefully observant Caton notes of 



* The legitimate assumption that " latent characters belonging to the 

 other sex are always present in each sexually differentiated organism " 

 (Weismann) does not help us to decide what these characters may be for a 

 particular sex and in a particular case, — a matter which can be determined 

 pnly from the facts as we find them, 



