There is, however, reason to believe that sexual selection has effected something in certain civilised and semi-civilised nations. Many persons are convinced, as it appears to me with justice, that the members of our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to the European standard of beauty, than the middle classes; yet the middle classes are placed under equally favourable conditions of life for the perfect development of the body. Cook remarks that the superiority in personal appearance “which is observable in the erees or nobles in all the other islands (of the Pacific) is found in the Sandwich islands;” but this may be chiefly due to their better food and manner of life. The old traveller Chardin, in describing the Persians, says their “blood is now highly refined by frequent intermixtures with the Georgians and Circassians, two nations which surpass all the world in personal beauty. There is hardly a man of rank in Persia who is not born of a Georgian or Circassian mother.” He adds that they inherit their beauty, “not from their ancestors, for without the above mixture, the men of rank in Persia, who are descendants of the Tartars, would be extremely ugly.”[448] Here is a more curious case: the priestesses who attended the temple of Venus Erycina at San-Giuliano in Sicily, were selected for their beauty out of the whole of Greece; they were not vestal virgins, and Quatrefages,[449] who makes this statement, says that the women of San-Giuliano are famous at the present day as the most beautiful in the island, and are sought by artists as models. But it is obvious that the evidence in the above cases is doubtful. The following case, though relating to savages, is well worth giving from its curiosity. Mr. Winwood Reade informs me that the Jollofs, a tribe of negroes on the west coast of Africa, “are remarkable for their uniformly fine appearance.” A friend of his asked one of these men, “How is it that every one whom I meet is so fine-looking, not only your men, but your women?” The Jollof answered, “It is very easily explained: it has always been our custom to pick out our worse-looking slaves and to sell them.” It need hardly be added that with all savages female slaves serve as concubines. That this negro should have attributed, whether rightly or wrongly, the fine appearance of his tribe, to the long-continued elimination of the ugly women, is not so surprising as it may at first appear; for I have elsewhere shewn[450] that negroes fully appreciate the importance of selection in the breeding of their domestic animals, and I could give from Mr. Reade additional evidence on this head.