1882.] Beauty in the Eyes of an Evolutionist. 133 
namely, the facilitation of marriage relations with an order 
having the means to bring up a larger percentage of their pro- 
geny. Besides which, the higher classes are more tenacious of 
life than the lower, because they are sprung from progenitors 
the length of whose lives enabled them to hoard for their issue 
that wealth on which alone social position depends. Therefore 
to marry into a class above one’s own is usually equivalent to 
having children of greater natural vitality — entailing a corres- 
pondingly abundant transmission of the ambition to future 
generations. 
The theory of Beauty dealt with in this article relates to 
the beauty of an animal in the eyes of its own species, and 
therefore it is unnecessary to dwell here upon that which man 
sees in brutes, which, if comparable to a human type, — as, 
for instance, in their optical organs or in their hair, — may 
be pleasing or otherwise. If not so comparable, they are 
almost outside aesthetics ; for an elephant, or hedgehog, can 
hardly by their appearance cause more aesthetic emotion in 
us than a locomotive or a lump of coal. 
Of landscape, and the charms which exterior Nature at 
large has for us, it may be affirmed that our taste must have 
been formed with reference to the environment, those best 
pleased with their surroundings reaping such physical ad- 
vantage therefrom in health, &c., that they were the most 
viable and prolific in the locality, and so left more descend- 
ants, inheriting their taste. If vegetation had been uni- 
versally red instead of green, and the sky brown instead of 
blue, those colours would have been thought most beautiful 
for earth and sky, — not indeed by us, but by those who, 
under those altered circumstances, would have been selected 
to occupy our places. If people now living under clouded 
skies prefer the blue welkin, it is because their race has in- 
herited a love for the same from forefathers who long dwelt 
under a cerulean vault. The leaden canopy of England 
will be charming to those living under it when a sufficient 
number of generations have passed for Natural Selection to 
have adted on. The love of mountain scenery which some 
men possess records the fadt that their ancestors were bene- 
fited by such a taste, which led them to dwell in localities 
least accessible to the foe. 
The proper subjedts for artistic representation are those 
which are pleasing to our sight by reason of their relation 
to the past environment of our race. We like to see on 
canvas simple peasants in homely attire, rather than 
fashionable people dressed in the latest mode. Delineations 
of steamships, railway trains, and other appurtenances of 
civilisation, seem out of place on the walls of an academy. 
