least among the more intelligent Pagan tribes, have no difficulty in
getting the husbands whom they may desire, although it is considered
unwomanly to ask a man to marry them. They are quite capable of falling
in love, and of forming tender, passionate, and faithful attachments.
Additional cases could be given.
We thus see that with savages the women are not in quite so abject a
state in relation to marriage as has often been supposed. They can
tempt the men whom they prefer, and can sometimes reject those whom
they dislike, either before or after marriage. Preference on the part
of the women, steadily acting in any one direction, would ultimately
affect the character of the tribe; for the women would generally choose
not merely the handsomest men, according to their standard of taste,
but those who were at the same time best able to defend and support
them. Such well-endowed pairs would commonly rear a larger number of
offspring than the less favoured. The same result would obviously
follow in a still more marked manner if there was selection on both
sides; that is, if the more attractive, and at the same time more
powerful men were to prefer, and were preferred by, the more attractive
women. And this double form of selection seems actually to have
occurred, especially during the earlier periods of our long history.
We will now examine a little more closely some of the characters which
distinguish the several races of man from one another and from the
lower animals, namely, the greater or less deficiency of hair on the
body, and the colour of the skin. We need say nothing about the great
diversity in the shape of the features and of the skull between the
different races, as we have seen in the last chapter how different is
the standard of beauty in these respects. These characters will
therefore probably have been acted on through sexual selection; but we
have no means of judging whether they have been acted on chiefly from
the male or female side. The musical faculties of man have likewise
been already discussed.
ABSENCE OF HAIR ON THE BODY, AND ITS DEVELOPMENT ON THE FACE AND HEAD.
From the presence of the woolly hair or lanugo on the human foetus, and
of rudimentary hairs scattered over the body during maturity, we may
infer that man is descended from some animal which was born hairy and
remained so during life. The loss of hair is an inconvenience and
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