64 
THE DESCENT OF MAN. 
Part I. 
of their male partners, all the labour and anxiety exhi- 
bited by them in displaying their charms before the 
females would have been thrown away ; and this it is 
impossible to admit. Why certain bright colours and 
certain sounds should excite pleasure, when in harmony, 
cannot, I presume, be explained any more than why 
certain flavours and scents are agreeable ; but assuredly 
the same colours and the same sounds are admired by 
us and by many of the lower animals. 
The taste for the beautiful, at least as far as female 
beauty is concerned, is not of a special nature in the 
human mind ; for it differs widely in the different 
races of man, as will hereafter be shewn, and is not 
quite the same even in the different nations of the 
same race. Judging from the hideous ornaments and 
the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it 
might be urged that their aesthetic faculty was not so 
highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in 
birds. Obviously no animal would be capable of ad- 
miring such scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful 
landscape, or refined music ; but such high tastes, de- 
pending as they do on culture and complex associa- 
tions, are not enjoyed by barbarians or by uneducated 
persons. 
Many of the faculties, which have been of inesti- 
mable service to man for his progressive advance- 
ment, such as the powers of the imagination, wonder, 
curiosity, an undefined sense of beauty, a tendency 
to imitation, and the love of excitement or novelty, 
could not fail to have led to the most capricious 
changes of customs and fashions. I have alluded to 
this point, because a recent writer 50 has oddly fixed 
on Caprice “ as one of the most remarkable and 
50 ‘The Spectator/ Dec. 4th, 18G9, p. 1430. 
