APART from the familiar instances of male colour-decoration afforded by birds, we find that even some of the minute water-fleas inhabiting freshwater lakes and the sea, and known as Crustacea Entomostraca, put on a courting dress at the breeding season; that is to say, the males become brilliantly coloured with patches of red and blue. And among the highest mammals we find that the same colours are, in some cases, displayed by the males as a fascination to the females. This is the case with the males of some of the baboons, though not with those of the highest man-like apes, who, like the primitive "savage" man, have no decoration, no pretty seductive ways appealing to either the eye or the ear, but rely on their strength and ferocity to overawe and paralyze the female. In the male "mandrill" baboon the skin of the sides of the great snout is of a deep blue colour, whilst the nose and a tract behind it is wax-like and bright red. Not only that, but the buttocks are brilliantly coloured, a central red area passing at the sides through rich purple to pale blue. The animal, which is often to be seen in menageries, is evidently proud of this finely-coloured region of his body, and turns it to a visitor and remains quietly posed, so that it may be well seen and duly admired. The hind-quarters of other monkeys, both male and female, show a brilliant red colouring during the mating season, and the skin and hair of the face is variously coloured, so as to produce a decorative pattern (eyebrows, moustache, beard, nose, all strongly contrasted in colour) in the smaller monkeys, usually more strikingly in the males than in the females. A brilliant emerald-green patch of colour is shown in the hinder part of the body of the male in one species sometimes to be seen at Regent's Park.

The making of sounds is a capacity possessed by many animals, small and big. Often it seems to have no particular significance, but, as in the case of the "humming" of bees and flies and the "droning" of beetles, is the necessary accompaniment of the vibration of the wings. But many animals make sounds as a "call," either to other individuals of their species, irrespective of sex, or more definitely as signals and appeals to the other sex, just as the luminosity which happens to accompany certain necessary chemical activities in the bodies of the lower animals has become specialized and utilized in the glow-worm and other higher forms as a signal and appeal. The rubbing of rough surfaces against one another is developed into a "stridulating organ" which we find in crickets, locusts, scorpions, spiders, and even in marine crustacea, and it is often specialized as a sexual appeal. The mere production of sound by tapping against wood is used by the little beetle, the death-watch, as a call, and is responded to by his mate with similar tapping. Such "tapping" is developed into a remarkable rhythmic vibrating sound by the birds called woodpeckers, and has its significance in courtship. But it is chiefly by the inspiration and expiration of air over vibrating cords or membranes called "vocal organs" that animals produce distinctive and musical sounds. In most cases such animals have a more general and simple "cry," which is not necessarily a sexual appeal, but addressed to comrades generally, and also a more elaborate cry or song which is primarily used by the male as an attraction in courtship, but has in the case of many birds been inherited from original male singers by the females also. The "singing" of birds—apart from simpler cries and calls—is a sexual address, an act of courtship. It is a display of power and capacity on the part of the male, and that such is its character is shown by the competition between male birds in the endeavour to "out-sing" one another. Some birds become extraordinarily excited in these competitions, which take the place of actual fighting, the victor who silences his opponents being the winner of the female bird, who is at hand listening to the competition. Caged chaffinches are celebrated for their eagerness to compete with one another in singing. They deliver their little song alternately until one is exhausted and unable to take up his turn. He is vanquished. So excited do the birds become that it occasionally happens that one of the competitors drops down dead. The beginning and directive causes of the particular song of different kinds of birds is not understood. But it is well known that they have a great gift of imitation. Parrots, piping crows, ravens, and other such birds are familiar instances, whilst little birds such as bullfinches can be trained to whistle the melodies which human beings have invented. Even the house-sparrow, which, though allied to singing finches, never sings at all when in natural conditions, has been converted into a songster by bringing it up in company with piping bullfinches.

Other animals which cannot sing like the birds yet use their voices in courtship. The frogs and toads are no mean performers in this way, whilst cats, deer, and other large animals are "singers," of a kind, when stirred by mate-hunger. The monkeys chatter and make various vocal sounds, but the gibbons and man-like apes produce excessively loud and penetrating cries. These cries, though sometimes of fine note and repeated rhythmically (as in the gibbons and chimpanzees), have not the character of song. The beginnings of song in mankind are lost in the mist of ages. The Australian black-fellows chant and dance with rhythmic precision and a certain kind of melancholy cadence, but they never attempt to fascinate the other sex by the use of the voice (nor, so far as is known, in any other way), and, indeed, there is a vast interval between their vocal performances and the love-songs of modern civilized races. Man has not inherited singing from his animal ancestry, but has re-invented it for himself. His real knowledge and command of "music" is actually a novelty which has sprung into existence within the last few hundred years.

There is no doubt that animals of the same species are attracted to one another by smell, and that distinct species have distinct smells. Further, there is no doubt that in many cases the special smell of either sex attracts the other. But modern man has so nearly lost the sense of smell—why it is difficult to say, excepting that it is because it was not of life-saving value to him—that it is very difficult for us to estimate properly the significance of perfumes and odours. We know that the dog has what to us seems a marvellous power of tracking and recognizing by smell, and that other animals appear to be similarly endowed, though most usually we cannot perceive the smell at all which they recognize and follow. It appears that nearly all the hairy quadrupeds have distinctive odours, which they and their companions can readily recognize, secreted by certain glands in the skin placed here and there on the body, often on the legs and toes. Some of these odours, like musk and civet, we can perceive, though most have no effect on us. It seems to be an evidence of the absence of any need for man to produce "perfumes" by the action of his own structure that he has a feeble sense of smell and has so little perception of any perfumes or odours peculiar to himself that he has when civilized always made use of odorous substances (perfumes and scents) extracted from other animals and from plants for the purpose, before the days of cleanliness, of masking the unpleasant odours of putrescence pervading his body and clothing. Later, when dirt became less common, he made use of perfumes for the purpose of giving an agreeable whiff to the olfactory organs of his associates.

In insects, for instance in moths and butterflies, and no doubt in most if not all others, the sense of smell is astonishingly keen, and serves as the great guide and attraction in courtship and the appeasement of mate-hunger. A single female emperor moth was placed in a box covered with fine net in a room with an open window in a country house. In three hours a dozen males of this species had entered the room, but no other moths. In twenty-four hours there were over a hundred, all fluttering around the net-covered box in which was the female. In this and other similar experiments it was found that the odour of the female moth, though imperceptible to man, clung to the box after she was removed, and that, for some days following, the empty box was nearly as powerful an attraction to the males as when it contained the female. The antennÆ which carry the olfactory sense-organs are far larger in the males than in the females, as is also the case in many other lower animals where smell is a guide to mating. A single female of the vapourer moth, which is common in the London squares and parks, has been found to attract when placed in a box in an open window in Gower Street a number of males from the neighbouring plantations; and such is the penetrating and powerful character of these odorous substances produced by female moths that in one species, in which the female is wingless and lives under water, the odour escapes through the water and attracts the males in quantities to its surface. The females then arise from the depths, and, like mermaids or the witch of the Rhine, draw the infatuated males beneath the water to love and death. In several butterflies it has been shown that the males produce sweet perfumes on the surface of the wings, which can be detected as such by man, and act as stimulants to the mate-hunger of the female butterflies, which follow the scented male in numbers. The sense of smell is thus seen to be a much more powerful guide in insects than might be supposed, and it is of equally great importance to them in other enterprises and activities of life besides those of courtship. It has also a leading importance in all the lower and lowermost animals, and is the ultimate guide (for smell and taste are not separable in such simple forms) of the motile spermatic filament in its journey to the egg cell.

I have in the course of these notes on "Courtship" more than once stated that though man shares in common with all other animals the ultimate impulse to "courtship," namely, "mate-hunger," yet that it would be a mistake to suppose that he has mechanically inherited from animal ancestors (as they do) those methods of attracting and endeavouring to fascinate the female, such as the use of gay costume, dancing and posing, beautiful singing, sweet perfume, and gentle caresses, which, at various phases of his development, he has practised. True, these methods are also practised by a variety of animals, but not by man's immediate ape-like ancestors. None of these means of courtship are inherited instincts or structures in man as they are in animals. All have been arrived at and devised by man afresh, as the result of "taking thought." And in the latest advance of civilization some of them have been to a large extent either discarded or, curiously enough, handed over to the female sex. It is the woman now who endeavours to captivate the man by a display of brave colours, clothes, plumes, and jewellery, and by exquisite dancing and gesture. Not so long ago both sexes of man practised such display, but in earliest times only the male, the woman being allowed to sport a discarded rag or a broken old necklace if she were very satisfactory and submissive in her general conduct!

I must endeavour very briefly to explain how this contrast of "instinct" with "thought, knowledge, reason, and will" must (as it seems to me) be regarded. There are three great steps in the gradual evolution of the mind. The first is the slow formation (by variation and survival of the fittest) of transmissible, and therefore inherited, mechanisms of the mind, which are of various degrees of complexity, and characterize different species and kinds of animals. These mechanisms act automatically like those of a "penny-in-the-slot machine," and are just as regularly present, and as much alike in all individuals of a species, as are the other inherited structures, such as bones, flesh, viscera, the skin and its coloured clothing of decorative feathers or hair.

Later, and added to these inherited mechanisms—often interfering with them and putting an end to them—are the mechanisms of the second step. These are mechanisms arising from individual experience; they depend on memory—the inscription on "the tablets of the mind," of the experience that this follows that. They control movement and action, usurping the privilege of the previously omnipotent inherited mechanisms or instincts. This second step in the development of mind requires an excessive quantity of brain-cells. It only makes its appearance at all in animals with large brains, and reaches a far greater development in man even than in the apes, his brain being from twice to three times the size of that of the largest living ape. This use of memory and individual experience—instead of an inherited mechanism, which is the same in every member of the species—is obviously a great advantage in the struggle for existence. There are traces of it in some of the cuttlefish and insects, but even in the fishes and reptiles among living vertebrates it is of small account, and the small brain carries on its work by good, sound, inherited mechanisms or instincts, but learns nothing, comprehends nothing! In the birds we see a little—a very little—more capacity for "learning by individual experience," and it is only in the larger and later mammals that educability, or the power of learning by individual experience, becomes of serious importance. All the larger living mammals—horse, cattle, sheep, rhinoceros, tapir—have acquired an enormous increase in the size of their brains—as much as six or eight times the volume of that of their extinct ancestors whose bones and brain cavities we find fossilized in the Tertiary strata. Man has by far the biggest brain of all these animals, and has a unique degree of educability, together with the fewest instincts or in-born hereditary mechanisms among animals. He has practically to learn by individual experience—and therefore in the form best suited to his individual requirements—a host of most important actions and behaviours which even monkeys as well as dogs and sheep and horses never have to "learn," but proceed to put in practice as soon as they are born, or, at any rate, without any preliminary process of experiment and effort. Man is the one highly "educable" animal. In consequence of his large brain and its roomy memory he can be, and is—even when a "savage"—educated. Monkeys and dogs have only small "educability" as compared with man, though more than have reptiles or fishes. Man's mind is, therefore, in this essential feature different from that of animals. The modern mammals with brains as much as eight times the bulk of their early Tertiary ancestors have, it is true, acquired "educability" and the power of storing individual experience as "memory," but their memory is far less extensive than that of man, and though its guidance is of great value to them it acts entirely, or nearly so, without consciousness. No doubt man's brain includes some hereditary mechanisms, but in the main it distinctively consists of nerve-mechanisms, formed by his own individual education, acting on receptive and specially educable brain matter. And the brain mechanism formed by education is of greater life-saving value than is that of the inherited instincts which meet general emergencies, but not those new and special to the individual.

The third step in the development of mind is the arrival (for one can call it by no other term) of that condition which we call "consciousness"—the power of saying to oneself "I am I," and of looking on as a detached existence not only at other existences but at one's own mental processes, feelings, and movements. With it comes thought, knowledge, reason, and will. We may speak of consciousness as invading or spreading gradually over the territory of mind. All the three steps of the growth of mind which I have distinguished can be seen following one on the other in the growth of a human child from infancy to adolescence. The second step—the development of individual mechanisms due to memory—is not in most animals, and not entirely in man, pervaded by or "within the area of" consciousness. Memory is at first "unconscious memory," and there still remains in man a capacity for forming "memory" which never (or in some matters only exceptionally) becomes illuminated by consciousness. Apparently the inherited mechanisms which we call "instincts" are never within the reach of consciousness, though, of course, the actions determined by them are. It is a difficult matter to decide how far the memory of apes, dogs, and such animals nearest to man is conscious memory. Probably very little. But it is only when memory, as well as the impression of the moment, is pervaded by consciousness that reflection, and reason and action dependent on reason, are possible.[6]

Hence it is that man in all the procedure of courtship stands apart from animals. Even the Australian has not only an educable brain, but a more or less conscious memory. He seems to be permanently, in this respect, in the condition of an ordinary European child of about five years old. Gradually in the course of the development, both of increased educability and of more and more efficient and serviceable education, man has first abandoned by slow degrees his violent ancestral methods of procuring a mate, and has, as the result of observation, reflection, and conscious reasoning, taken to courtship by persuasion and fascination, similar to that of the birds and other remote creatures, retaining, however, for a long period his habit of fighting with other males to establish his claim to the woman of his choice. And at last, in his later development in civilized lands, he has abandoned the more obvious arts of courtship and has taken to decorating his womankind instead of himself. He has made woman take over the habit of courtship by the fascination of colour and pose whilst he looks on in sombre clothing with thoughtful reserve. He does not any longer even rely on his strength or skill in fighting in order to scatter his rivals, but makes appeal by word to the sympathy of the desired mate and trusts to the fascination which the power, given either by superior intellectual quality or by accumulated wealth, have for her.