Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/680

662 marks of useful properties, we do not admire white cheeks, which are the external mark of weakness or anæmia. Similarly, our idea of beauty demands that the figure should neither be too fat nor too thin, but should possess that graceful development of all the muscles which is the outward symbol of ability to move and act with ease and effect. If any large number of persons were ever actuated by opposite tastes, if they preferred pale cheeks and lips to rosy ones, thin and haggard faces to full and rounded ones, weak and angular limbs to strong and graceful ones, a flat and undeveloped chest to a fine and healthy bust, then they and their taste must rapidly die out through the inferior physique they would hand on to their descendants. And as every individual is himself the product of countless thousands of prior individuals, all of whom have been in the main successful in the struggle for life and the search for mates, it must follow that he will have inherited from them, on the average, a healthy taste for that particular arrangement of limbs and features which best suits the essential conditions of the species. Not, of course, that he will consciously recognize this fact in most cases; but the mere presentation of such a typical combination will instinctively rouse in him, through the organized correlation of nervous centers, the hereditary feeling of beauty. Hence this feeling will probably be most strongly aroused in each species by the sight of the sex which in that species has undergone the greatest differentiation through sexual selection: just as we know that the feeling is most strongly aroused in mankind by the beauty of woman. On the other hand, we are still able to perceive, when we look at a peacock or a humming-bird, that, thought his specific hereditary feeling is absent, yet the strength of the purely abstract elements—color, brilliancy, symmetry, form, and minute workmanship—is so unusually great that we have no hesitation in pronouncing them also beautiful after their kind.

If, then, we admit the reality and potency of sexual selection, in however modified a form, it must follow that birds, being on the whole the most ornamental of all classes in the animal world, are also the most æsthetic, with the exception of man. It might, at first sight, seem that consistency would demand the sacrifice even of this exception; but a moment's reflection will disclose an important difference between the two cases. Man possesses the active power of direct artistic creation; the birds only possess the passive power of selection from among the forms produced for them by Nature. The ordinary workman who selects his wife partly or wholly on the ground of beauty, thereby does something toward perpetuating and improving the beauty of the race; he stamps the impress of his taste upon future generations; but such mere passive choice differs widely from the ability to depict or create on canvas such a beautiful woman. In this way, the actual loveliness of birds may lead us somewhat to over-estimate their aesthetic sensibility; for, though within their own species they may be