the earliest stages of animal evolution down to the present time.  It is the factor in the great theory of sexual selection that corresponds to the insistence and directness of the male.  Coyness and caprice have in consequence become a heritage of the sex, together with a cohort of allied weaknesses and petty deceits, that men have come to think venial and even amiable in women, but which they would not tolerate among themselves.

Various forms of natural character and temperament would no doubt be found to occur in constant proportions among any large group of persons of the same race, but what those proportions may be has never yet been investigated.  It is extremely difficult to estimate it by observations of adults, owing to their habit of restraining natural ill tendencies, and to their long-practised concealment of those they do not restrain but desire to hide.  The necessary observations ought, however, to be easily made on young children in schools, whose manifestations of character are conspicuous, who are simultaneously for months and years under the eye of the same master or mistress, and who are daily classed according to their various merits.  I have occasionally asked the opinion of persons well qualified to form them, and who have had experience of teaching, as to the most obvious divisions of character to be found among school children.  The replies have differed, but those on which most stress was laid were connected with energy, sociability, desire to attract notice, truthfulness, thoroughness, and refinement.

The varieties of the emotional constitution and of likings and antipathies are very numerous and wide.  I may give two instances which I have not seen elsewhere alluded to, merely as examples of variation.  One of them was often brought to my notice at the time when the public were admitted to see the snakes fed at the Zoological Gardens.  Rabbits, birds, and other small animals were dropped in the different cages, which the snakes, after more or less serpentine action, finally struck with their poison fangs or crushed in their folds.  I found it a horrible but a fascinating scene.  We lead for the most part such an easy and carpeted existence, screened from the stern realities of life and death, that many of us are impelled to draw aside the curtain now and then, and gaze for a while behind it.  This exhibition of the snakes at their feeding-time, which gave to me, as it doubtless did to several others, a sense of curdling of the blood, had no such effect on many of the visitors.  I have often seen people—­nurses, for instance, and children of all ages—­looking unconcernedly and amusedly at the scene.  Their indifference was perhaps the most painful element of the whole transaction.  Their sympathies were absolutely unawakened.  I quote this instance, partly because it leads to another very curious fact that I have noticed as regards the way with which different persons and races regard snakes.  I myself have a horror