which I inserted in the second volume of the General Morphology are
the first sketches of their kind. In Chapter 2.27, particularly, I
trace the chief stages in man's ancestry, as far as it is possible to
follow it through the vertebrate stem. I tried especially to
determine, as well as one could at that time, the position of man in
the classification of the mammals and its genealogical significance. I
have greatly improved this attempt, and treated it in a more popular
form, in chapters 26 to 28 of my History of Creation (1868).* (* Of
which Darwin said that the Descent of Man would probably never have
been written if he had seen it earlier.--Translator.)

It was not until 1871, twelve years after the appearance of The Origin
of Species, that Darwin published the famous work which made the
much-contested application of his theory to man, and crowned the
splendid structure of his system. This important work was The Descent
of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this Darwin expressly
drew the conclusion, with rigorous logic, that man also must have been
developed out of lower species, and described the important part
played by sexual selection in the elevation of man and the other
higher animals. He showed that the careful selection which the sexes
exercise on each other in regard to sexual relations and procreation,
and the aesthetic feeling which the higher animals develop through
this, are of the utmost importance in the progressive development of
forms and the differentiation of the sexes. The males choosing the
handsomest females in one class of animals, and the females choosing
only the finest-looking males in another, the special features and the
sexual characteristics are increasingly accentuated. In fact, some of
the higher animals develop in this connection a finer taste and
judgment than man himself. But, even as regards man, it is to this
sexual selection that we owe the family-life, which is the chief