Professor Poulton, in considering this case of _Astra vittata_ with its two male forms, one of which is always chosen by the female in preference to the other, remarks (with his own italics), “It must be admitted that these facts afford the _strongest support_ to the theory of Sexual Selection.”[134] He thus endorses—as anyone, I think, not hard-set the other way, must endorse—the opinion of the authors of the paper that “in the _Attidæ_ we have conclusive evidence that the females pay close attention to the love dances of the males, and also that they have not only the power, but the will, to exercise a choice among the suitors for their favour,”[135] to which he adds this rider: “Remembering that this conclusion has only been reached in the _Attidæ_ by the closest study, I think we may safely explain the smaller confidence with which we can speak of other animals by the want of sufficiently careful and systematic investigation.” The process of the narrative having led, in the last chapter or two, to a discussion of some of the ways in which insects become shaped and coloured through natural selection, sexual selection seemed marked out as the subject for this one. The reason why I have filled it with extracts from a certain very interesting paper has been a better one than that of saving myself trouble. That paper—the most important one perhaps that has ever been written on the subject—is a wonderful confirmation of Darwin’s views, but Darwin, as it appears to me, has not benefited by it in the way that he ought to do in the popular mind. There is no work that I know of, written upon merely popular lines, that brings these facts forward, and yet I feel sure that to large numbers of people, who yet do not care to read books avowedly scientific, they must be extremely interesting, not only in themselves, but as allowing them both to form a judgment on the subject, and on the correctness or otherwise of Darwin’s views—for Darwin is an interesting and picturesque figure far beyond the close borough of science.