Savages certainly never choose their wives for fine voices, but for rude health, and strength, and physical beauty.

Sexual selection could not therefore have developed this wonderful power, which only comes into play among civilized people." Reverting once more to beauty of form and colour, there is one manifestation of it for which no one can pretend that sexual selection can possibly account.

The instance referred to is that presented by bivalve shell-fish.[44] Here we meet with charming tints and elegant forms and markings of no direct use to their possessors[45] in the struggle for {55} life, and of no indirect utility as regards sexual selection, for fertilization takes place by the mere action of currents of water, and the least beautiful individual has fully as good a chance of becoming a parent as has the one which is the most favoured in beauty of form and colour.
Again, the peculiar outline and coloration of certain orchids--notably of our own bee, fly, and spider orchids--seem hardly explicable by any action of "Natural Selection." Mr.Darwin says very little on this singular resemblance of flowers to insects, and what he does say seems hardly to be what an advocate of "Natural Selection" would require.

Surely, for minute accidental indefinite variations to have built up such a striking resemblance to insects, we ought to find that the preservation of the plant, or the perpetuation of its race, depends almost constantly on relations between bees, spiders, and flies respectively and the bee, spider, and fly orchids.[46] This process must have continued for ages constantly and perseveringly, and yet what is the fact?
Mr.Darwin tells us, in his work on the Fertilization of Orchids, that neither the spider nor the fly orchids are much visited by insects, while, with regard to the bee orchid, he says, "I have never seen an insect visit these flowers." And he shows how this species is even wonderfully and specially modified to effect self-fertilization.
In the work just referred to Mr.Darwin gives a series of the most wonderful and minute contrivances by which the visits of insects are utilized for the fertilization of orchids,--structures so wonderful {56} that nothing could well be more so, except the attribution of their origin to minute, fortuitous, and indefinite variation.
The instances are too numerous and too long to quote, but in his "Origin of Species"[47] he describes two which must not be passed over.

In one (_Coryanthes_) the orchid has its lower lip enlarged into a bucket, above which stand two water-secreting horns.