In this new light, the gaily-bedizened individuals of the Insect world may be surveyed afresh. The explanation of such of their features as are commonly attributed to Sexual Selection in terms of female choice, whereby only the most favoured from among a crowd of suitors could hope to succeed, may now be replaced by that which obtains also in the case of the higher animals. It seems to fit the facts better. One cannot understand, for example, how, on the interpretation of Sexual Selection, the extraordinary disparity in numbers between the sexes of some species of Butterflies came about. Thus in that marvellously beautiful genus Ornithoptera there is one species (_O. brookiana_) in which the females are excessively rare; so much so that the collector Kunstler could only obtain fifteen females to one thousand males. Though the males, among the Butterflies, are commonly much more numerous than the females, the disparity is rarely so great as with this species; but there are many in which the proportion of males to females is as fifty to one. As with the higher vertebrates selection affords no explanation of this curious disproportion. Though according to Weismann it fulfills “the first postulate in ‘Sexual Selection’ namely, that there be an unequal number of individuals in the two sexes.” But Sexual Selection here has a little over-reached itself, for surely one hundred suitors seems an embarrassing number for an inexperienced female to have to choose from! To say nothing of the ninety-nine males doomed to perish without leaving offspring. That the beauty of colour and form which the Lepidoptera, and especially the diurnal Lepidoptera, or Butterflies, exhibit is due to the choice by the females—albeit an unconscious choice—of the most resplendent of her suitors, that is, in other words, that she yields at last to the most ravishing member of the crowd—there is no evidence to show. There would seem to be no possibility of a differential selection from among a number of males, for there is no “display” comparable to that, say, of birds. And what is more, it is unlikely that, if there were, she would find anything to choose between them, for the range of variation in, say, one hundred males of any given species is very slight. Finally we have no trustworthy evidence to show that the eyes of Butterflies and Moths are sufficiently good to enable them to make nice distinctions between slightly different males. We have no evidence that the eyes of Insects are capable of discriminating the details of the often intricate patterns which their own wings, and those of their suitors, exhibit.