All this is perfectly true; but it entirely fails to go far enough to meet the difficulty.

Now passing over such difficulties as the fact that bright colours in flowers do not attract insects in many cases, but much more inconspicuous flowers if they have a scent (mignonette, for example) do; passing over such a fact as that afforded by the violet, which (as some may not be aware) has two kinds of flower, one scented and of a beautiful colour, the other green and inconspicuous, and it is the latter, not the former which is usually fertile;—­passing over all detailed difficulties of this kind, I allude only to the one great one, that in all these cases, besides mere bright colour, conspicuousness or showiness, there is a great and wonderful beauty of pattern, design, or colour arrangement, in nature.  Now there is not a particle of evidence to show that any animal has, to the smallest extent, a sense of beauty.  On the contrary it is most improbable.  The sense of artistic beauty is not only peculiar to man, but only exists in him when civilized and cultivated.  Uneducated people among ourselves have no sense of landscape and other beauty.  How then can it exist in animals?

If there was nothing to explain but a uniform bright and showy colour, natural selection might be sufficient to account for it.  How is it, then, that this is not the case?  We have not only colour, but colour diversified in the most elaborate and charming manner.  Look at the exquisite patterns on a butterfly’s wing! look at the various delicate arrangements of colour and pattern in flowers; or look again at the arrangement of colour on a humming-bird—­sometimes the tail, sometimes the breast is ornamented, sometimes a splendid crest covers the head, sometimes a jewelled gorget or ruff surrounds the throat; and these are not uniformly coloured, but exhibit metallic and other changes of lustre not to be imitated by the highest art.  But to fully realize this, I had best refer to a more familiar instance.  Let any one examine—­as an object very easily procurable in these days—­a peacock’s feather.  No doubt the whole tail when expanded is very brilliant; but look closely at the structure of a single feather; is all this arrangement needed only to make the tail bright or conspicuous?  Observe how wonderfully the outer parts are varied; part has a metallic lustre of copper, part has this also shot with green:  then there is a delicate ring of violet with a double yellowish border, all quite distinct from the inmost gorgeous “eye” of green, blue, and black, and all arranged on the same feather!

Take, again, the so-called diamond beetle of Brazil; here the wing case is black studded all over with little pits or specks, which as a whole only give it a powdery pale-green colour; but place it in the sunlight and look at it with a magnifying glass—­each little speck is seen to be furnished with a set of minute metallic scales showing green and red flashes like so many diamonds.  How does such a delicate ornament answer the demands of mere conspicuousness?