rely
dispenses with the very hypothetical and inadequate agency of female
choice in producing the detailed colours, patterns, and ornaments, which
in so many cases distinguish the male sex.

If my arguments on this point are sound, they will dispose also of Mr.
Grant Allen's view of the direct action of the colour sense on the
animal integuments.[161] He argues that the colours of insects and birds
reproduce generally the colours of the flowers they frequent or the
fruits they eat, and he adduces numerous cases in which flower-haunting
insects and fruit-eating birds are gaily coloured. This he supposes to
be due to the colour-taste, developed by the constant presence of bright
flowers and fruits, being applied to the selection of each variation
towards brilliancy in their mates; thus in time producing the gorgeous
and varied hues they now possess. Mr. Allen maintains that "insects are
bright where bright flowers exist in numbers, and dull where flowers are
rare or inconspicuous;" and he urges that "we can hardly explain this
wide coincidence otherwise than by supposing that a taste for colour is
produced through the constant search for food among entomophilous
blossoms, and that this taste has reacted upon its possessors through
the action of unconscious sexual selection."

The examples Mr. Allen quotes of bright insects being associated with
bright flowers seem very forcible, but are really deceptive or
erroneous; and quite as many cases could be quoted which prove the very
opposite. For example, in the dense equatorial forests flowers are
exceedingly scarce, and there is no comparison with the amount of floral
colour to be met with in our temperate meadows, woods, and hillsides.
The forests about Para in the lower Amazon are typical in this respect,
yet they abound with the most gorgeously coloured butterflies, almost
all of which frequent the forest depths, keeping near the ground, where
there is the greatest deficiency of brilliant flowers. In contrast with
this let us take the Cape of Good Hope--the most flowery region probably
that exists upon the globe,--where the country is a complete
flower-garden of heaths, pelargoniums, mesembryanthemus, exquisite
iridaceous and other bulbs, and numerous flowering shrubs and trees; yet
the Cape butterflies are hardly equal, either in number or variety, to
those of any country in South Europe, and are utterly insignificant when
compared with those of the comparatively flowerl