shrews and hedgehogs, and thence once more by very well-marked intermediate stages to the lemurs of Madagascar, a group linked on the one hand to the insectivores, and on the other to the true monkeys. The monkeys, again, 'branched off into two great stemsthe New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter, at a remote period, man, the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded.'

The word was spoken; the secret was out. The world might well have been excused for treating it scornfully. But as a matter of fact, the storm which followed the 'Descent of Man' was as nothing compared with the torrent of abuse that had pursued the author of the Origin of Species.' In twelve years society had grown slowly accustomed to the once startling idea, and it listened now with comparatively languid interest to the final utterance of the great biologist on the question of its own origin and destinies. In 1859 it cried in horror, 'How very shocking!' in 1871, it murmured complacently, 'Is that all? Why, everybody knew that much already!'

Nevertheless, on the moral and social side, the ultimate importance of the 'Descent of Man' upon the world's history can hardly be overrated by a philosophic investigator. Vast as was the revolution effected in biology by the 'Origin of Species,' it was as nothing compared with the still wider, deeper, and more subtlyworking revolution inaugurated by the announcement of man's purely animal origin. The main discovery, strange to say, affected a single branch of thought alone; the minor corollary drawn from it to a single species has already affected, and is destined in the future still

more profoundedly to affect, every possible sphere of human energy. Not only has it completely reversed our entire conception of history generally, by teaching us that man has slowly risen from a very low and humble beginning, but it has also revolutionised our whole ideas of our own position and our own destiny, it has permeated the sciences of language and of medicine, it has introduced new conceptions of ethics and of religion, and it threatens in the future to produce immense effects upon the theory and practice of education, of politics, and of economic and social science. These wide-reaching and deep-seated results began to be felt from the first moment when the Darwinian principle was definitely promulgated in the 'Origin of Species, but their final development and general acceptance was immensely accelerated by Darwin's own authoritative statement in the 'Descent of Man.'

To some among us still, as to Lyell before us, this < new belief in the animal origin of man seems far less beautiful, noble, and inspiriting than the older faith in his special and separate divine creation. Such thinkers find it somehow more pleasant and comfortable to suppose that man has fallen than that man has risen; the doctrine of the universal degradation of humanity paradoxically appears to them more full of promise and aspiration for the times to come than the doctrine of its universal elevation. To Darwin himself, however, it seemed otherwise. 'Man,' he says, ' may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in

the distant future.' Surely this is the truer and manlier way of looking at the reversed and improved attitude of man. Surely it is better to climb to the top than to have been placed there-and fallen-at the very outset. Surely it is a nobler view of life that we may yet by our own strenuous exertions raise our race some places higher in the endless and limitless hierarchy of nature, than that we are the miserable and hopelessly degenerate descendants of a ruined and degraded angelic progenitor. Surely it is well, while we boast with Glaucus that we indeed are far braver and better than our ancestors, to pray at the same time, in the words of Hector, that our sons may be yet braver and better than

ourselves.

CHAPTER IX.

THE THEORY OF COURTSHIP.

IN the same volumes with the 'Descent of Man' Darwin - included his admirable treatise on sexual selection. This form of selection he had already dealt with briefly in the 'Origin of Species;' but as in his opinion it was largely instrumental in producing the minor differences which separate one race of men from another, he found it necessary to enlarge and expand it in connection with his account of the rise and progress of the human species.

Among many animals, and especially in the higher classes of animals, the males and females do not mate together casually; there is a certain amount of selection or of courtship. In some cases, as with deer and antelopes, the males fight with one another for the possession of the females. In other cases, as with the peacock and the humming-birds, the males display their beauty and their skill before the eyes of the assembled females. In the first instance, the victor obtains the mates; in the second instance, the mates themselves select from the group the handsomest and most personally pleasing competitor. Sexual selection, of which these are special cases, depends on the advantage

possessed by certain individuals over others of the same sex and species solely in respect to the question of mating. In all such instances, the males have acquired their weapons of offence and defence or their ornamental decorations, not from being better fitted to survive in the struggle for existence, but from having gained an advantage over other males of the same kind, and from having transmitted this advantage to offspring of their own sex alone.

Just as man can improve the breed of his gamecocks by the selection of those birds which are victorious in the cockpit, so the strongest and most vigorous males, or those provided with the best weapons, have prevailed in the state of nature over their feebler and more cowardly competitors. Just as man can give beauty, according to his own standard of taste, to his male poultry, by selecting special birds for their plumage, their port, their wattles, or their hackles, so female birds in a state of nature have by a long-continued. choice of the more attractive males added to their beauty and their ornamental adjuncts. In these two ways, Darwin believed, a limited selection has slowly developed weapons like the horns of buffaloes, the antlers of stags, the tusks of boars, and the spurs of game-birds, together with the courage, strength, and pugnacity always associated with such special organs. It has also developed the ornamental plumage of the peacock, the argus pheasant, and the birds of paradise ; the song of the lark, the thrush, and the nightingale; the brilliant hues on the face of the mandrill; and the attractive perfume of the musk-deer, the snakes, and the scented butterflies. Wherever one sex possesses