This reasoning may appear far-fetched and unconvincing. It seems, however, quite likely that the hen may select as her mate the suitor who is conspicuously different from the others, not because she admires novelty, but because his conspicuousness attracts her attention and enables her to make up her mind quickly to take him and thus rid herself of the other troublesome admirers, who are all very much alike. Sexual Dissimilarity It is perhaps worthy of note that, after the most successful of her suitors has succeeded in securing the hen, it may happen that a disappointed rival makes love to her in the absence of her lord and master and thereby nullifies the effect of her previous selection. It is to be observed that, even if we take it as proved, as Darwin believed, that the hens alone exercise a choice of mates, and that they select the most beautiful of their suitors, we are still far from arriving at an explanation of the fact that the males alone have acquired beauty. Admitting that the hens always mate with the most beautiful cocks, we should expect the offspring of each union to be all more or less alike in beauty—that is to say, more beautiful than the mother and less so than the cock. How are we to explain the one-sided inheritance of this beauty? Why is it confined to the cocks? In order to meet this objection Darwin had to call to his aid unknown laws of inheritance. “The laws of inheritance,” he writes (_Descent of Man_, p. 759), “irrespectively of selection, appear to have determined whether the characters acquired by males for the sake of ornament, for producing various sounds, and for fighting together, have been transmitted to the males alone or to both sexes, either permanently or periodically, during certain seasons of the year. Why various characters should have been transmitted sometimes in one way and sometimes in another is not in most cases known; but the period of variability seems often to have been the determining cause. When the two sexes have inherited all characters in common, they necessarily resemble each other; but, as the successive variations may be differently transmitted, every possible gradation may be found, even within the same genus, from the closest similarity to the widest dissimilarity between the sexes.” This statement, although it does not throw any light upon the problem, is somewhat damaging to the theory of sexual selection. If it be admitted that dissimilarity between the sexes is due to the fact that the males have varied in one way and the females in another way, there seems no necessity for invoking the aid of feminine preference.