Admiration of Personal Beauty does not appear, therefore, to enter noticeably into animal love, except in so far as a slight amount of æsthetic taste may be admitted in birds. This taste may be strengthened by the sight of the brilliant masculine ornaments during the season of love being associated with the remembered pleasures of courtship. Indirectly, however, female animals promote the cause of beauty by preferring the more healthy and vigorous individuals, who are commonly also the most beautiful ones. And is not the same true of females of the human persuasion, who likewise are much less influenced in their choice by the beauty than by the boldness, energy, vivacity, and “manliness” of their suitors? It seems to hold true throughout nature that the female’s Love is weak in the æsthetic element, her taste being little developed and too often neutralised by unconscious utilitarian considerations. LOVE AMONG SAVAGES STRANGERS TO LOVE In passing from animals to human beings we find at first not only no advance in the sexual relations, but a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds, courtship and marriage are infinitely more refined and noble than among the lowest savages; and it is especially in their treatment of females, both before and after mating, that not only birds but all animals show an immense superiority over primitive man; for male animals only fight among themselves, and never maltreat the females. This anomaly is easily explained. The intellectual power and emotional horizon of animals are limited; but in those directions in which Natural Selection has made them _specialists_, they reach a high degree of development, because inherited experience tends to give to their actions an instinctive or quasi-instinctive precision and certainty. Among primitive men, on the other hand, reason begins to encroach more on instinct, but yet in such a feeble way as to make constant blunders inevitable: thus proving that strong instincts, combined with a limited intellectual plasticity, are a safer guide in life than a more plastic but weak intellect minus the assistance of stereotyped instincts.