common, and, since they are only fully displayed during the breeding season, that is, when the male is sexually excited, they will have an exciting effect on the female too. These inflated horns are symptoms of excitement, and they arouse it in the female. In exactly the same way the decorative feathers, the ruby-red and emerald-green feather collars of the humming-birds and birds of Paradise, are only erected and displayed when the males are wooing, and they, too, act as signs of excitement. This is not to say that the gorgeousness of colour, the eye-spots on the train of the peacock and the Argus pheasant, and the hundreds of different kinds of beautiful feathers, do not also exercise a fascinating influence; on the contrary, we cannot avoid assuming this, since otherwise we could find no sufficient reason for their origin. But the primary effect in wooing is not due to the mere pleasure in the sight, or in the odour, or in the song, but to the contagious excitement which these express. The females do not behave as dispassionate judges, but as excitable persons which fall to the lot of the male who is able to excite them most strongly. It may be, however, that a sense of æsthetic satisfaction in perceiving such symptoms of excitement may also have been evolved as an accessory effect, at least in the higher and more intelligent animals. In the lower animals, which are lacking not only in intelligence but also in the higher and more complex differentiation of the sensory system, the development of such secondary sex characters is rare or altogether absent. Animals which have no sense of hearing can develop no song, and animals which do not see cannot acquire gorgeous colours as a means of exciting one sex through the other. But distinctive sex coloration may arise even in lowly animals, though there can be no question of æsthetic pleasure associated therewith; if the animals are able to see the colours at all, sexual excitement may be associated with these. We need not wonder, therefore, that in the somewhat stupid fishes, in the butterflies, and in the lower crustaceans, like the Daphnids, we still find brilliant colours, which we can hardly interpret otherwise than as the results of sexual selection. On the other hand, the absence of such characters in animals of a still lower order, with still simpler sense-organs, like the Polyps, Medusæ, Echinoderms, most Worms, and the Sponges, affords an indirect confirmation of the correctness of our view as to the reality of a sexual selection in the more highly organized animals.