British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII / January and April, 1871

by Various

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. By Charles Darwin, M.A., F.R.S. John Murray.

The pleasure of reading Mr. Darwin's long-promised volumes, which has been keenly anticipated, is at length gratified. Both the subject and the man exercise a strange fascination upon the public mind. As an experienced naturalist, a speculative philosopher, and a keen logician, Mr. Darwin would command the attention of men of science under any circumstances, but he has the secret of personal power and popularity quite apart from the accomplishments which allow him to be classed with other naturalists and philosophers. It is not the lucid clearness of his style, nor his power of collecting, selecting, and grouping facts, nor the shrewdness and breadth of his generalizations, alone, which give his readers their exquisite sense of delight as they follow him through his descriptions, his arguments, and his speculations. Beyond all this, he has that sensuous delight in the real, the beautiful, and the truthful—that appreciation of the grandeur of universal law, visible in the minutest details, and that union of the receptive and active faculties which constitute the artist and the genius who owes more to Nature than to culture. If an argument may be derived from what man is, and from the mental excellence which he is capable of exhibiting, to rebuff the theory that he is of so humble a parentage as Mr. Darwin represents, the author himself would be a refutation of his own theory. In contemplation of his own powers he might say with Hamlet, 'What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! and yet, what to me is this quintessence of dust!' The lineal descendant proximately of 'a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits and an inhabitant of the old world; remotely, of an animal more like the larvæ of existing ascidians (lining sacks), than any other known form!'

Mr. Darwin's volumes treat of two subjects of profound but not of equal interest. The difference in the interest felt in man's descent and in sexual selection is well shown in the numerous reviews and notices of this work which have already appeared. More than two-thirds of the work is devoted to sexual selection, and this subject is treated, not exhaustively, it is true, for that is quite impossible in the present state of our knowledge, but methodically and comprehensively. A vast number of fresh facts are presented; a great array of old ones are marshalled in due order; the phenomena are traced as they appear throughout the whole animal kingdom, and historians and travellers are adduced in evidence to elucidate problems physical and metaphysical. Yet reviewers have not taken notice of this, which is really the most valuable part of the work; guided by a popular instinct they revert to the subject of man's descent. They do this although there is not nearly so much freshness, either in the facts or arguments presented in this portion of his work. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' is a dictum which men who are no students will readily adopt, because the subject is not far to seek. That man, the orang, and the gorilla, have a common ancestor is so fascinating an idea that none can resist its weird influence. The clergy repeat it from their pulpits in scornful utterance, as though the simple statement carried its own refutation. Transcendental philosophers like Vogt assume it as a demonstrated fact. Wits joke about it. The ears of ladies blush, not at the praise of their own loveliness, but because of the pointed and telltale evidence these bear of their own origin. The fascination of this idea was evident from the first appearance of 'The Origin of Species.' The public insisted on seeing in it nothing but evidence that man had sprung from a lower form. Yet in that work it was evident that Mr. Darwin purposely avoided the discussion of this point. No one will be surprised to learn, from the introduction of the present work, that during many years the author had collected notes on the origin and descent of man without any intention of publishing on the subject—but rather with the determination not to publish—that he might not add to the prejudice against his views. Yet the multitudes who talk about the book they have never read, as if they had done so, have all along supposed and assumed that the one question thus designedly avoided was the subject of the whole treatise. No doubt most of the arguments in favour of the derivation and origin of species, told with equal force as proofs of the like derivation and origin of man, but there was yet room for a supplemental theory, founded on the vast elevation of man's moral and mental capacity, which would make man an exceptional species with an exceptional origin. That such a view was possible, may be inferred from the concluding chapter in Mr. Wallace's book on the same subject, in which a peculiar Providence is made to preside over the evolution of man. There can, however, be no mistake now about Mr. Darwin's view of the question. His assertions about the origin of man from a lower form are not only confident, but he has become dogmatic upon the subject. The attitude of dogmatism is new to him, and we must say does not become him so well as the cautious candour of his earlier work. Mr. Darwin writes:—'The main conclusion arrived at in this work, and now held by many naturalists who are competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly-organized form. The ground upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken.... It is incredible that all these facts should speak falsely. He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of Nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation.'

In his speculations as to the genealogical descent of man and the way in which it emerges from the ancestral tree of the animal creation, Mr. Darwin is almost wholly guided by the rudimentary organs found in man. Mr. Darwin is quite consistent in this method. No doubt rudimentary organs which are functionless in our species and have dwindled almost to nothing, but are developed and have a palpable use in other allied forms, present the greatest difficulties to those who do not believe in a derivative origin of species, and also afford the strongest support to the selection theory. After enumerating the aborted organs, the transient and fœtal structures, and the often-recurring abnormalities found in man, which are some seventeen or eighteen in number, the author works out his theory of origin almost strictly in accordance with the plan of associating the ancestors of man proximately with those species which possess the most of these analogous structures, and so on to the larger divisions in which a fewer number of them have a wider distribution. This plan is, no doubt, philosophical, but it leads the author into some strange speculations. By similar reasoning it is demonstrable that our ancestors were hermaphrodite, and thus long after they had ceased to be so both sexes yielded milk to nourish their young, and perhaps carried them in marsupial sacks.

A doctrine thus dogmatically stated, of course involves problems and theories hard to solve and demonstrate, but this arises, in the opinion of the author, from the fact that the solutions and demonstrations are hard to find, and not from the doctrines which involve them being in the least doubtful. The existence of the moral sense in man is one of these problems, and one of the most interesting chapters in this portion of the work is devoted to an explanation of the evolution of human conscience. The moral sense is traced to those social instincts which man has in common with all gregarious animals. The strengthening and growth of the memory and judgment would enable man to compare his past actions, and the mere abiding satisfaction of the process would create that distinction between the higher and lower law or motive which is all that modern moralists require. 'Ultimately a highly complex sentiment having its first origin in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in the latter times by deep religious feeling, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense in conscience.'

The second portion of the work is a valuable contribution to science. It is far more philosophical in its tone. It is a repertory of facts. The theories to which these facts point are indeed discussed, but the method is inductive, while the method of the first portion appears to us to be deductive. Beauty as distinguished from use has always been a stumbling-block to the disciples of the natural selection school. That which, in any species, pleases our minds by immediate agency of the senses, as distinguished from that which is of service to that species in adapting it to external conditions, is quite unaccounted for by the survival of the fittest, at least so far as wild and untamed species are concerned. Some evolutionists would cut the knot by denying the evidence of beauty apart from fitness. Suitability, symmetry, conspicuousness, and an imposing appearance are, no doubt, desiderata which natural selection may seize upon and secure, and these may incidentally and necessarily involve that which is beautiful in our eyes. But after all these have been eliminated or satisfied, there yet remains in a large number of species an element of beauty the contemplation of which brings pleasure to all human beings, whether educated or uneducated, refined or unrefined. This is especially the case throughout those large, numerously represented and dominant classes taken from two separate sub-kingdoms and called insects and birds. These two classes occupy a great deal of the attention of Mr. Darwin. If we assume any evolutionary theory, and abjure the doctrine of final causes, all the varied beauty of butterflies and humming-birds has but one probable explanation, namely, that of sexual selection. To make even this explanation possible, we must assume a keen, discriminating æsthetic faculty in animals which is like in quality with our own, as that faculty is possessed by the most refined of our species. Moreover, this faculty must be intimately connected with the sexual appetency in each species. Such a connection is, judging from analogy, not improbable. In forming an opinion how far these views are correct, it is important to isolate the operation of sexual selection from that of natural selection. Nature has throughout almost the whole animal kingdom afforded to us the means of isolation. For, as a general rule, the sexes in species are not absolutely alike, and often there is great difference between them. All sexual peculiarities therefore which cannot be explained on the principle of division of labour, throw light upon the æsthetic faculty of animals as a selective, and therefore by the theory of a creative agency. Mr. Darwin has collected a vast mass of facts about sexual peculiarities, which being in no way connected with the sexual function, he calls secondary sexual characters. Of course, sexual secondary characters so limited point to a difference in the modification of the sexual desire by æsthetic appetite in the two sexes. Generally speaking, the adorned sex is the male. Have, then, the females a greater appreciation of beauty than their males? Mr. Darwin thinks the ardour of the male destroys his discrimination. Some facts produced, however, seem to run directly counter to this supposition. On all hands the peacock is considered the most splendid of birds, and the difference between the sexes in this species is carried to an extreme point. Yet, one of Mr. Darwin's best authenticated facts is, that the pea-hen differs from most birds in being the ardent wooer.

One of the happiest and most satisfactory episodes in the book is the account of the genesis of the eye-spot in the plumage of birds, and specially of that of the ball and socket ornament in the secondary wing-feathers of the Argus pheasant. The treatment of this subject reminds us, by its clearness and beauty, of the author's treatises on coral islands and the fertilization of orchids. How simple a phenomenon may disclose a world of interest and wonder when in the hands of a man of genius! It seems to us, however, that that wonderfully faithful representation of a round ball lying in a hollow socket, expressed on the flat of the web of a feather, offers a striking example of the inadequacy of either natural or sexual selections to explain such phenomena. 'That these ornaments,' says Mr. Darwin, 'should have been formed through the selection of many successive generations, not one of which was originally intended to produce the ball and socket effect, seems as incredible as that one of Raphael's Madonnas should have been formed by the selection of chance daubs of paint made by a long succession of artists, not one of whom intended to draw the human figure.' Exactly so! We must attribute to the hen Argus pheasant the æsthetic powers of a Raphael in order to account for the decorations of her mate, or, more properly, we must assign to a succession of multitudes of generations of birds a correctness of appreciation of the draughtsman's art, such as is a rare excellence among men. This may be a fact, but if so, it opens up a new realm to our imagination. It must be admitted that the tendency of modern thought is to obliterate the fast line drawn by old authors between reason and instinct, and to assign the former less exclusively to man, and the latter less exclusively to animals. This tendency and the incidental light thrown by these considerations on these interesting questions are well exemplified in Mr. Darwin's work.

A curious disagreement in opinion between Messrs. Darwin and Wallace is brought out and treated of lengthily in the chapters on birds. Mr. Wallace thinks that in the case of splendid cock-birds who have plain hens, who sit on open nests, the tendency for both sexes to become brilliant has been checked by natural selection. On the other hand, Mr. Darwin thinks that secondary sexual splendour was from the first developed only in the male; and in the converse case, where the female is also gay, natural selection causes her to build a covered nest for protection. We think Mr. Darwin has the best of the argument. The question of whether the standard of beauty among men is uniform in its essentials or not is ably discussed, but no conclusion is arrived at; so contradictory is the evidence of travellers and observers.

We heartily endorse Mr. Darwin's dictum that false facts are highly injurious to the progress of science; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm. We are therefore content to

'Let him, the wiser man, who springs