Now the general more intelligent public who read, perhaps, widely, but not very deeply or very specially, know that Darwin believed in two forces—natural and sexual selection—by the joint action of which, species, as he held, had been gradually modified and evolved, and they know that the former of these two has been accepted by science, but that to the latter there has been much more opposition, and that it is not—or is not supposed to be—established like the other. Many, perhaps, may have read Dr. Wallace’s _Darwinism_, a work in which Darwin’s most distinctive and original view—that one whose conception, apparently, he shared with nobody and on which he based much of the argument contained in his _Descent of Man_—is considered and rejected in a way which makes the title of the book misleading, surely, if not a somewhat comically ludicrous misnomer. All those who have read it, as well as many who have not, will be interested—they cannot fail to be—in the wonderful record of spider courtships contained in these extracts, and having reflected on them, they will, if I mistake not, be much more impressed with the arguments _for_ this part of Darwinism than they were with those brought against it in the book of that name. All these latter arguments, by the way—the languor of swallows as against the vitality of parrots, trogons, etc.—were well known to Darwin himself; and as no one was, at the same time, more impartial in considering, and more capable of correctly estimating, facts hostile to his own theories, or which, at first sight, might seem to be so, it may not be out of place to end this chapter with a reference to what he thought of them. This we may gather from a statement contained in a paper—the last, presumably, ever written by him—which was read before the Zoological Society but a few hours before his death, and which is as follows: “I may, perhaps, be here permitted to say that, after having carefully weighed, to the best of my ability, the various arguments which have been advanced against the principle of sexual selection, I remain firmly convinced of its truth.” ----- Footnote 130: Tropical Nature, p. 97. Footnote 131: Malay Archipelago (1898), p. 331. Footnote 132: Observations on Sexual Selection in Spiders. Footnote 133: Occasional Papers of the Natural History Society of Wisconsin, vol. i., Nos. 1, 2, and 3. Footnote 134: The Colours of Animals. Footnote 135: Occasional Papers of the Natural History Society of Wisconsin, vol. i., Nos. 1, 2, and 3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIII