[189] The remarks of the Marquis de Brisay, an authority on doves, as communicated to Giard (L’Intermediare des Biologistes, November 20, 1897), are of much interest on this point, since they correspond to what we find in the human species:  “Two birds from the same nest rarely couple.  Birds coming from the same nest behave as though they regarded coupling as prohibited, or, rather, they know each other too well, and seem to be ignorant of their difference in sex, remaining unaffected in their relations by the changes which make them adults.”  Westermarck (op. cit., p. 334) has some remarks on a somewhat similar tendency sometimes observed in dogs and horses.

[190] See Appendix to vol. lii of these Studies, “The Sexual Impulse among Savages.”

[191] See, especially, ante, pp. 163 et seq.

[192] Kistemaecker, as quoted by Bloch (Beitraege, etc., ii. p. 340), alludes in this connection to the dark clothes of men and to the tendency of women to wear lighter garments, to emphasize the white underlinen, to cultivate pallor of the face, to use powder.  “I am white and you are brown; ergo, you must love me”; this affirmation, he states, may be found in the depths of every woman’s heart.

[193] K. Pearson, Grammar of Science, second edition, p. 430.

[194] In Man and Woman (fourth edition, p. 65) I have referred to a curious example of this tendency to opposition, which is of almost worldwide extent.  Among some people it is, or has been, the custom for the women to stand during urination, and in these countries it is usually the custom for the man to squat; in most countries the practices of the sexes in this matter are opposed.

[195] It is sufficient to quote one example.  At the end of the sixteenth century it was a serious objection to the fashionable wife of an English Brownist pastor in Amsterdam that she had “bodies [a bodice or corset] tied to the petticoat with points [laces] as men do their doublets and their hose, contrary to I Thess., v, 22, conferred with Deut. xxii, 5; and I John ii, 16.”

V.

Summary of the Conclusions at Present Attainable in Regard to the Nature of Beauty and its Relation to Sexual Selection.

The consideration of vision has led us into a region in which, more definitely and precisely than is the case with any other sense, we can observe and even hope to measure the operation of sexual selection in man.  In the conception of feminine beauty we possess an instrument of universal extension by which it seems possible to measure the nature and extent of such selection as exercised by men on women.  This conception, with which we set out, is, however, by no means so precise, so easily available for the attainment of sound conclusions, as at first it may seem to be.