to
the higher animals. The whole of the vegetable world, and the whole of
the animal world at least as high up in the scale as the insects, must
be taken as incapable of aesthetic feeling. Therefore, the extreme
beauty of flowers, sea-anemones, corals, and so forth, cannot possibly
be ascribed to sexual selection.

Now, with regard to this difficulty, we must begin by excluding the case
of the vegetable kingdom as irrelevant. For it has been rendered highly
probable--if not actually proved--by Darwin and others, that the beauty
of flowers and of fruits is in large part due to natural selection. It
is to the advantage of flowering plants that their organs of
fructification should be rendered conspicuous--and in many cases also
odoriferous,--in order to attract the insects on which the process of
fertilization depends. Similarly, it is to the advantage of all plants
which have brightly coloured fruits that these should be conspicuous for
the purpose of attracting birds, which eat the fruits and so disseminate
the seed. Hence all the gay colours and varied forms, both of flowers
and fruits, have been thus adequately explained as due to natural
causes, working for the welfare, as distinguished from the beauty, of
the plants. For even the distribution of colours on flowers, or the
beautiful patterns which so many of them present, are found to be useful
in guiding insects to the organs of fructification.

Again, the green colouring of leaves, which lends so much beauty to the
vegetable world, has likewise been shown to be of vital importance to
the physiology of plant-life; and, therefore, may also be ascribed to
natural selection. Thus, there remains only the forms of plants other
than the flowers. But the forms of leaves have also in many cases been
shown to be governed by principles of utility; and the same is to be
said of the branching structure which is so characteristic of trees and
shrubs, since this is the form most effectual for spreading out the
leaves to the light and air. Here, then, we likewise find that the cause
determining plant beauty is natural selection; and so we may conclude
that the only reason why the forms of trees which are thus determined by
utility appeal to us as beautiful, is because we are accustomed to these
the most ordinary forms. Our ideas having been always, as it were,
moulded upon these forms, aesthetic feeling becomes attached to them by
the principle of association. At any rate, it is