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The theory, with regard to birds is, that in the love-season, when the males are excited and engage in courtship, the females do not fall to the strongest and most active, nor to those that are first in the field; but that in a large number of species they are endowed with a faculty corresponding to the aesthetic feeling or taste in man, and deliberately select males for their superiority in some aesthetic quality, such as graceful or fantastic motions, melody of voice, brilliancy of colour, or perfection of ornaments.
And next morning, when the men came, they saw by the signs that the whole thing had been planned, and that the leader whose cunning had made it a success was a little Bob-tailed Coyote. The men were angry, and Lincoln was furious; but Jake remarked: "Well, I guess that Bobtail came back and got even with that Terrier." When spring was near, the annual love-season of the Coyotes came on.
And this was, in substance, what Darwin did. There are many species in which the male, singly or with others, practises antics or sings during the love-season before the female; and when all such cases, or rather those that are most striking and bizarre, are brought together, and when it is gratuitously asserted that the females do choose the males that show off in the best manner or that sing best, a case for sexual selection seems to be made out.
The argument has been stated very binefly: but little would be gained by the mere multiplication of instances, since, however many, they would bo selected instances from a single district, it is true, while those in the Descent of Man were brought together from an immeasurably wider field; but the principle is the same in both cases, and to what I have written it may be objected that, if, instead of twenty-five, I had given a hundred cases, taking them as they came, they might have shown a larger proportion of instances like that of the cow-bird, in which the male has a set performance practised only during the love-season and in the presence of the female.
But has a friend or lover been snatched from thee as from me forever? Dost thou grieve for something more than space and freedom? Yet why do I ask? Thy love-season has come round again, has it not? and love is the greatest blessing of thy little life! I understand thee, poor bird! I will no longer be thy fate! Fly away, and God help you! Begone, and enjoy the two greatest blessings of life!
The love-season is the carnival of egoism, and it brings the touchstone to our natures. I speak of love, not the mask, and not of the flutings upon the theme of love, but of the passion; a flame having, like our mortality, death in it as well as life, that may or may not be lasting.
Privately he did so; and he was constituted by his extreme sensitiveness and taste for ultra-feminine refinement to be a severe critic of them during the carnival of egoism, the love-season. Constantia . . . can it be told?
In the late whiter and early spring the love-season the Hounds will not hunt a She-wolf. They will quit the trail of a He-wolf at this time to take up that of a She-wolf, but when they do overtake her, they, for some sentimental reason, invariably let her go in peace.
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