1882.] Beauty in the Eyes of an Evolutionist . 
77 
discernment in the mind of the admiring spectator, or else 
that he is indifferent to the appearance of most of the ob- 
jects that present themselves to his sight. Nevertheless I 
think that it may be shown, to all those who believe in 
Evolution and in Sexual Selection, that the “ fitness ” 
theory is true as regards all those beauties which in either 
sex most impress the minds of the other sex, such beauties 
being the outward visible signs of certain qualities of body 
and mind which make an individual to be one of the fittest 
to survive in its environment. 
From the Darwinian theory, that the struggle for existence 
results in the survival of the “fittest,” it appears to follow 
also that the number of descendants springing from those 
who, through their superior fitness, survive, must be greater 
than the number of those deriving descent from the less fit, 
and also — and this is the fact upon which, I think, that a 
sound theory may be built — that wherever Sexual Selection 
prevails (that is to say, wherever either sex can exercise 
choice in mating) those whose aesthetic taste delights most 
in the outward indications of the possession, by the other 
sex, of qualities which go to make up the “ fittest,” will 
have more descendants than those whose fancy is better 
pleased with indications of the possession of qualities which 
make a person less fit. And thus, since the taste will in 
either case be inherited, there will be a general tendency, 
generation after generation, to bring the aesthetic taste of a 
community into strict harmony with the characters of body 
and mind most proper to the environment. 
The environment to which any type of beauty is thus 
correlative will not of necessity be that in which a race is 
living. It must be that in which its ancestry lived in the 
past time, during which the taste was being formed ; but 
there will not be this discordance where the whole commu- 
nity has lived in the same environment for many generations. 
In other circumstances, such as the change of environment 
caused by permanent migrations, a corresponding change of 
taste must be in process. 
It is well known that the different races of mankind do 
not agree in their ideas of Beauty. This fact is readily ex- 
plicable on the supposition that the various environments 
are the foundations on which the various tastes are built. 
For those who love to see in the opposite sex those outward 
indications of the possession of characters which have little 
value in the struggle for existence, and mate accordingly , will 
have fewer descendants than those who fall in love with the 
visible signs of the possession of such qualities as are pre- 
eminently useful in the environment. 
