competition among the males for the favour of each female; no more
fighting for love, in which the strongest male conquers; no more
rival display of personal charms, in which the best-looking or
best-mannered prevails. The drama of courtship, with its prolonged
strivings and doubtful success, would be cut quite short, and the
race would degenerate through the absence of that sexual selection
for which the protracted preliminaries of love-making give
opportunity. The willy-nilly disposition of the female in matters of
love is as apparent in the butterfly as in the man, and must have
been continuously favoured from the earliest stages of animal
evolution down to the present time. It is the factor in the great
theory of sexual selection that corresponds to the insistence and
directness of the male. Coyness and caprice have in consequence
become a heritage of the sex, together with a cohort of allied
weaknesses and petty deceits, that men have come to think venial and
even amiable in women, but which they would not tolerate among
themselves.

Various forms of natural character and temperament would no doubt be
found to occur in constant proportions among any large group of
persons of the same race, but what those proportions may be has
never yet been investigated. It is extremely difficult to estimate
it by observations of adults, owing to their habit of restraining
natural ill tendencies, and to their long-practised concealment of
those they do not restrain but desire to hide. The necessary
observations ought, however, to be easily made on young children in
schools, whose manifestations of character are conspicuous, who are
simultaneously for months and years under the eye of the same master
or mistress, and who are daily classed according to their various
merits. I have occasionally asked the opinion of persons well