Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazon (1864), p. 333. Footnote 118: In 1813 Dr. Wells, first amongst the moderns, conceived, or at least formulated in writing, the idea of natural selection; but Aristotle, as is usual in such cases, had anticipated him as well as Darwin, Wallace, and one or two others, and that in a very unmistakable sentence (see footnote on first page of the “Historical Sketch” in _The Origin of Species_). It would seem, however, that no one of these conceptions was influenced by any previous one. Of sexual selection Darwin seems to have been the discoverer as well as, in the opinion of many, the demonstrator. Footnote 119: Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, pp. 108-12. Footnote 120: Swallows have the highest temperature known amongst birds, viz. 111¼. Footnote 121: C. Collingwood, Rambles of a Naturalist in the China Seas, p. 183. Footnote 122: Scudder, Frail Children of the Air. Footnote 123: See pp. 179-181. Footnote 124: Scudder, Frail Children of the Air. Footnote 125: My own italics. Footnote 126: Scudder, Frail Children of the Air. Footnote 127: My own italics. Footnote 128: “Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley,” in _Trans. Linn. Soc._, vol. xxiii, p. 495. Footnote 129: Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, pp. 108-12. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXII Beautiful spiders—The “Peckham paper”—Spider courtship—Male antics and love-dances—Occasional accidents—Strength of the evidence—The one explanation—Darwin’s last words—His theory established. SPIDERS, as we have seen, may attain beauty by getting more and more like flowers, but beauty is not the attribute with which they are principally connected in our minds. Rather they are a synonym of something uncouth and horrid-looking, as well as of skill and persevering industry. For those of us, however, who have lived in the tropics they have other associations, for here, side by side with the most hideous of monsters, huge, dark, and hairy, are found others, small and gem-like, flashing indeed with beauty, the representatives in their order of the humming-birds, those “living sunbeams” of the Indians, amongst birds. These lovely little spiders belong to a particular family, the _Attidæ_, which has been placed by common consent at the head of all the others, since, whilst structurally, and in other respects, it is inferior to none, “it contains among its 1,500 species the greatest amount of sexual differentiation and the highest development of ornamentation.” Dr. Wallace, after noticing “their immense numbers, variety, and beauty,” in tropical South America, says, “Many of them are so exquisitely coloured as to resemble jewels rather than spiders”;[130] and again, in his work on the Malay Archipelago, he alludes to them as “perfect gems of beauty.”[131]