d or ill-occupied place in nature,
these facts cease to be strange, or might even have been anticipated.

We can to a certain extent understand how it is that there is so much
beauty throughout nature; for this may be largely attributed to the
agency of selection. That beauty, according to our sense of it, is not
universal, must be admitted by every one who will look at some venomous
snakes, at some fishes, and at certain hideous bats with a distorted
resemblance to the human face. Sexual selection has given the most
brilliant colours, elegant patterns, and other ornaments to the males,
and sometimes to both sexes of many birds, butterflies and other
animals. With birds it has often rendered the voice of the male musical
to the female, as well as to our ears. Flowers and fruit have been
rendered conspicuous by brilliant colours in contrast with the green
foliage, in order that the flowers may be easily seen, visited and
fertilised by insects, and the seeds disseminated by birds. How it comes
that certain colours, sounds and forms should give pleasure to man and
the lower animals, that is, how the sense of beauty in its simplest form
was first acquired, we do not know any more than how certain odours and
flavours were first rendered agreeable.

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts and improves the
inhabitants of each country only in relation to their co-inhabitants;
so that we need feel no surprise at the species of any one country,
although on the ordinary view supposed to have been created and
specially adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the
naturalised productions from another land. Nor ought we to marvel if all
the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we can judge, absolutely
perfect; as in the case even of the human eye; or if some of them be
abhorrent to our ideas of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of
the bee, when used against the enemy, causing the bee's own death; at
drones being produced in such great numbers for one single act, and
being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing
waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the
queen-bee for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within
the living bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases. The wonder,
indeed, is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the
want of absolute perfection have not been detected.

The complex and little known la