The argument has been stated very binefly: but
little would be gained by the mere multiplication
of instances, since, however many, they would bo selected
instances—from a single district, it is
true, while those in the Descent of Man were
brought 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 somewhat
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 patch work-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 preference;
but in a vast majority of species the male takes the
female he finds, or that he is able to win from other
competitors; and if we go to the reptile class we find
that in the ophidian order, which excels in variety
and richness of colour, there is no such thing as
preferential mating; and if we go to the insect class,
we find that in butterflies, which surpass all creatures
in their glorious beauty, the female gives herself
up to the embrace of the first male that appears,
or else is captured by the strongest male, just as
she might be by a mantis or some other rapacious insect.
CHAPTER XX.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE VIZCACHA.
(Lagostomus Trichodactylus.)
Copyrights
The Naturalist in La Plata from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
