Although, according to our taste, many kinds of monkeys are far from beautiful, other species are universally admired for their elegant appearance and bright colours. The _Semnopithecus nemæus_, though peculiarly coloured, is described as extremely pretty; the orange-tinted face is surrounded by long whiskers of glossy whiteness, with a line of chesnut-red over the eyebrows; the fur on the back is of a delicate grey, with a square patch on the loins, the tail and the fore-arms all of a pure white; a gorget of chesnut surmounts the chest; the hind thighs are black, with the legs chesnut-red. I will mention only two other monkeys on account of their beauty; and I have selected these as they present slight sexual differences in colour, which renders it in some degree probable that both sexes owe their elegant appearance to sexual selection. In the moustache-monkey (_Cercopithecus cephus_) the general colour of the fur is mottled-greenish, with the throat white; in the male the end of the tail is chesnut; but the face is the most ornamented part, the skin being chiefly bluish-grey, shading into a blackish tint beneath the eyes, with the upper lip of a delicate blue, clothed on the lower edge with a thin black moustache; the whiskers are orange-coloured, with the upper part black, forming a band which extends backwards to the ears, the latter being clothed with whitish hairs. In the Zoological Society’s Gardens I have often overheard visitors admiring the beauty of another monkey, deservedly called _Cercopithecus Diana_ (fig. 76); the general colour of the fur is grey; the chest and inner surface of the forelegs are white; a large triangular defined space on the hinder part of the back is rich chesnut; in the male the inner sides of the thighs and the abdomen are delicate fawn-coloured, and the top of the head is black; the face and ears are intensely black, finely contrasted with a white transverse crest over the eyebrows and with a long white peaked beard, of which the basal portion is black.[377] [Illustration: Fig. 76. Cercopithecus Diana (from Brehm).] In these and many other monkeys, the beauty and singular arrangement of their colours, and still more the diversified and elegant arrangement of the crests and tufts of hair on their heads, force the conviction on my mind that these characters have been acquired through sexual selection exclusively as ornaments.