on: RATTLESNAKE.]

Yet the males of some kinds of ape are adorned with quite exceptionally
brilliant local decoration, and the male orang is provided with remarkable,
projecting, warty lumps of skin upon the cheeks. As we have said, the
weaker female can hardly be supposed to have developed these by persevering
and long-continued selection, nor can they be thought to tend to the
preservation of the individual. On the contrary, the presence of this
enlarged appendage must occasion a slight increase in the need of
nutriment, and in so far must be a detriment, although its detrimental
effect would not be worth speaking of except in relation to "Darwinism,"
according to which, "selection" has acted through unimaginable ages, {50}
and has ever tended to suppress any useless development by the struggle for
life.[39]

[Illustration: COBRA.
(_Copied, by permission, from Sir Andrew Smith's "Reptiles of South
Africa."_)]

In poisonous serpents, also, we have structures which, at all events at
first sight, seem positively hurtful to those reptiles. Such are the rattle
of the rattlesnake, and the expanding neck of the cobra, the former seeming
to warn the ear of the intended victim, as the latter warns the eye. It is
true we cannot perhaps demonstrate that the victims are alarmed and warned,
but, on Darwinian principles, they certainly ought to be so. For the {51}
rashest and most incautious of the animals preyed on would always tend to
fall victims, and the existing individuals being the long-descended progeny
of the timid and cautious, ought to have an inherited tendency to distrust,
amongst other things, both "rattling" and "expanding" snakes. As to any
power of fascination exercised by means of these actions, the most
distinguished naturalists, certainly the most distinguished erpetologists,
entirely deny it, and it is opposed to the careful observations of those
known to us.[40]

The mode of formation of both the eye and the ear of the highest animals is
such that, if it is (as most Darwinians assert processes of development to
be) a record of the actual steps by which such structures were first
evolved in antecedent forms, it almost amounts to a demonstration that
those steps were never produced by "Natural Selection."

The eye is formed by a simultaneous and corresponding ingrowth of one part
and outgrowth of another. The skin in front of the future eye becomes
depressed, the depression increases and assumes the for