[159]

Tropaeolum minus Sept 29

[data not transcribed]

(Used)

[160]

29 27

Chap. 8

Everyone who has attended to the habits of animals will be able to call instances to mind. But judging from various facts, hereafter to be given, and from the results which may fairly be attributed to sexual selection, the female, though comparatively passive, generally appears commonly toexert a some choice and to accepts some one male in preference to others. Or she may accept, as appearances would sometimes even lead us to believe, the male that is on the part of by the female seems almost as general a fact law as the great eagerness of the male.

We are naturally led to ask enquire why in so many and such widely distinct classes the male has been made rendered more eager than the female, so that he searches for her and plays the more active part in courtship. It would be no gain and some loss of power for if both sexes were mutually to searched for each other; but why should the male almost always be the seeker? With plants, the seeds or spores after fertilisation have to be nourished for a time by the female hence the pollen has is necessarily to be brought to the stigma female organs,— by falling on it the stigma, by through the agency of insects or of the wind, or by the spontaneous movements of the stamens; and with the algæ