ified or been
prevented from acquiring the brighter plumage of the male, by need of
protection. I know that the Gallus bankiva frequents drier and more open
situations than the pea-hen of Java, which is found among grassy and
leafy vegetation, corresponding with the colours of the two. So the
Argus pheasant, male and female, are, I feel sure, protected by their
tints corresponding to the dead leaves of the lofty forest in which
they dwell, and the female of the gorgeous fire-back pheasant Lophura
viellottii is of a very similar rich brown colour.

I do not, however, at all think the question can be settled by
individual cases, but by only large masses of facts. The colours of the
mass of female birds seem to me strictly analogous to the colours of
both sexes of snipes, woodcocks, plovers, etc., which are undoubtedly
protective.

Now, supposing, on your view, that the colours of a male bird become
more and more brilliant by sexual selection, and a good deal of that
colour is transmitted to the female till it becomes positively injurious
to her during incubation, and the race is in danger of extinction; do
you not think that all the females who had acquired less of the male's
bright colours, or who themselves varied in a protective direction,
would be preserved, and that thus a good protective colouring would soon
be acquired?

If you admit that this could occur, and can show no good reason why it
should not often occur, then we no longer differ, for this is the main
point of my view.

Have you ever thought of the red wax-tips of the Bombycilla beautifully
imitating the red fructification of lichens used in the nest, and
therefore the FEMALES have it too? Yet this is a very sexual-looking
character.

If sexes have been differentiated entirely by sexual selection the
females can have no relation to environment. But in groups when both
sexes require protection during feeding or repose, as snipes, woodcock,
ptarmigan, desert birds and animals, green forest birds, etc., arctic
birds of prey, and animals, then both sexes are modified for protection.
Why should that power entirely cease to act when sexual differentiation
exists and when the female requires protection, and why should the
colour of so many FEMALE BIRDS seem to be protective, if it has not been
made protective by selection.

It is contrary to the principles of "Origin of Species," that colour
should have been produced in both sexes by sexual selection and