73 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are endowed with the sense of beauty. They find the proof of this 

 rather bold assertion, not in natural selection, which is a result of that 

 struggle for life in which the weakest individuals among species, and 

 the weakest species among genera, must disappear, but in sexual selec- 

 tion, which is a result of the struggle for reproduction, leading straight 

 to the same consequences, namely, to the improvement of species and 

 genera, which reaches, by slow elaboration through ages, even to their 

 transformation. Among all animals, they say, among insects, fish, 

 birds, mammals, the male chooses his female, and the female chooses 

 her mate. If strength often determines the choice, so beauty often 

 does too. The charm of graceful shapes, pleasing colors, fine notes, 

 has great weight in settling the preference. Now, this charm which 

 the male possesses habitually in a far higher degree than the female, 

 he could have no occasion for whatever in the struggle for existence ; 

 he can benefit by it only in the struggle for reproduction. Hence all 

 those displays of genuine coquetry which may easily be observed, in 

 pairing-time, among all animals ; hence those attractions prevailing 

 through vigor of form, brilliant hues, and impassioned song. This 

 general fact, well established under differences of appearance among all 

 species and all genera, gives the Darwinian school ground for assert- 

 ing that animals, having the perception of beauty, have consequently 

 the aesthetic sense. 



The opposing school, including of course all who prefer metaphys- 

 ics to physiology, is by no means wanting in excellent answers. It 

 says, by the pen of Charles Lev6que (in the Bevue des Deux Mondes 

 of September 1st), "the doctrine of Darwin rests, in its last analysis, 

 on the capital fact that the animal, the male sometimes, the female 

 sometimes, often both at once, is susceptible to the beauty of its kind. 

 That the animal is struck with it, we admit ; but does it feel really 

 this beauty of color, form, and song, in so far as it is beauty, or is 

 it not rather the fact that those brilliant tints, that vigor, that sweet- 

 ness of voice, form for the animal an indication, very expressive, yet 

 merely brute-like, of a physiological condition which its instinct ex- 

 pects, which itself stimulates and answers to ? " And this question, 

 which must involve in its solution that of the former one too, the anti- 

 Darwinians answer in the afiirmative, which is the negative of the 

 first question. They point out that this process of choice, in which 

 beauty wins the prize, takes place only at the season of pairing, and 

 ceases through all the rest of the year ; that if we concede to the ani- 

 mal a sense of the beautiful, within those limits, still the sense has but 

 one special object, finds its range within the species merely, never 

 reaches to a less concrete conception, does not widen, does not perfect 

 itself by tradition and culture, remains unchangeably set on the same 

 object, the same time, the same point ; that admiration which grows 

 from the expansion of this sense of beauty can only spring from very 

 varied and delicate comparisons ; in one word, that the animal, being 



