Mttsic and Dancing in Nature, 287 
together from an immeasurably wider field ; but the 
principle is the same in both cases, and to what I 
have written it may be objected that, if, instead of 
twenty-five, I had given a hundred cases, taking 
them as they came, they might have shown a larger 
proportion of instances like that of the cow-bird, in 
which the male has a set performance practised 
only during the love- season and in the presence of 
the female. 
It is, no doubt, true that all collections of facts 
relating to animal life present nature to us some- 
what as a ‘‘ fantastic realm ” — unavoidably so, in a 
measure, since the writing would be too bulky, or 
too dry, or too something inconvenient, if we did 
not take only the most prominent facts that come 
before us, remove them from their places, where 
alone they can be seen in their proper relations to 
numerous other less prominent facts, and rearrange 
them patchwork-wise to make up our literature. 
But I am convinced that any student of the subject 
who will cast aside his books — supposing that they 
have not already bred a habit in his mind of seeing 
only in accordance with verbal statement” — and 
go directly to nature to note the actions of animals 
for himself—actions which, in many cases, appear 
to lose all significance when set down in writing — 
the result of such independent investigation will be 
a conviction that conscious sexual selection on the 
part of the female is not the cause of music and 
dancing performances in birds, nor of the brighter 
colours and ornaments that distinguish the male. It 
is true that the females of some species, both in 
the vertebrate and insect kingdoms, do exercise a 
