Decadence of Darwinism 65 know as little of its essence as of that of matter. We may as well be modest. Accepting then the dictum of Professor Huxley—than whom no one has ever been better qualified—that it is almost impossible to prove the uselessness of rudiments, we pass the subject with the remark that, like likenesses, they are a signet of the Almighty and a badge of His creatures—not necessarily of kinship, but of remoter relations. There are some men who need the evidence of their own rudimentary mammae to prove to them that they belong to the same race with their wives and should endure the same hardships and do a little more work. SELECTIONS Sexual selection, as the name implies, is concerned with pairing and reproduction; but the Darwinian end in view, like that of natural selection, is evolution. But sexual selec tion fails to discriminate, and turns out degeneration. Feral and unregenerate sexual selection is more lust than love. From hares to elephants wild things are blinded by jealousy and crazed by heat. Like the Jukes’ family, they drop their young by the highway. We domesticate brutes and plants and, with great care and skill, breed them for improved points; but we soon tire and then dogs become pariahs, cats turn vagabonds, potatoes grow small, and horses are not worth catching and breaking. Cultivated apples never repeat their parent trees, but nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand sink far below them. The “loves of the plants”, as Darwin’s whimsical grandfather called them, are disreputable, and even, to this civilized day, human beings need to be restrained by law to prevent them from contracting unhealthful alliances. When the string breaks the kite falls. Ages before the time when Mr. Darwin dreamed that in the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchiae, with the two sexes united in
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