emale animals has been
advanced by exercise just as our own taste has improved (p. 616). On the
other hand, we find running throughout the book quite another idea. Of
cicadas he tells us that it is probable that, "like female birds, they are
excited or allured by the male with the most attractive voice" (p. 282);
and, coming to _Locustidae_, he states that "all observers agree that the
sounds serve either to call or excite the mute females" (p. 283). Of birds
he says, "I am led to believe that the females prefer or are most excited
by the more brilliant males" (p. 316). Among birds also the males
"endeavor to charm or excite their mates by love-notes," etc., and "the
females are excited by certain males, and thus unconsciously prefer them"
(p. 367), while ornaments of all kinds "apparently serve to excite,
attract, or fascinate the female" (p. 394). In a supplemental note, also,
written in 1876, five years after the first publication of the _Descent of
Man_, and therefore a late statement of his views, Darwin remarks that "no
supporter of the principle of sexual selection believes that the females
select particular points of beauty in the males; they are merely excited
or attracted in a greater degree by one male than by another, and this
seems often to depend, especially with birds, on brilliant coloring" (p.
623). Thus, on the one hand, Darwin interprets the phenomena as involving
a real esthetic element, a taste for the beautiful; on the other hand, he
states, without apparently any clear perception that the two views are
quite distinct, that the colors and sounds and other characteristics of
the male are not an appeal to any esthetic sense of the female, but an
appeal to her sexual emotions, a stimulus to sexual excitement, an
allurement to sexual contact. According to the first theory, the female
admires beauty, consciously or unconsciously, and selects the most
beautiful partner[22]; according to the second theory, there is no
esthetic question involved, but the female is unconsciously influenced by
the most powerful or complex organic stimulus to which she is subjected.
There can be no question that it is the second, and not the first, of
these two views which we are justified in accepting. Darwin, it must be
remembered, was not a psychologist, and he lived before the methods of
comparative psychology had begun to be developed; had he written twenty
years later we may be sure he would never have used so incautiously