Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DECORATION" IN BIRDS . The Splendid Sun-bird. The difference in the colouring of the sexes —Evolution of Species— Sun-birds—Birds of Paradise—Lyre-birds—Motmots—Puffins— The methods by which Birds acquire their plumage. The decoration of a bird is, as a rule, confined to the adult male. The females and the young birds are soberly coloured in comparison with the plumage of the old male, and that this is the general rule throughout the Class Aves is a well-known fact. As will be seen, however, later on, there are some remarkable exceptions, in which the female has the pre-eminence in ornamentation. The acquisition of brighter colours by the male, usually so pronounced in birds, probably depends upon sexual selection in the past,wherein the more brilliantly plumaged males would have possessed advantages over other males which had not these points to recommend them to the notice of the females. But that such an acquisition of brilliant colouring must have taken a long period of time to accomplish, is also evident, and even if the idea of sexual selection be mere theory, some of the facts which one meets with in a daily study of birds are interesting enough to make one hazard a possible explanation as to how such a development in the decoration of the male may have proceeded, even if it be impossible to give in detail the exact method by which it was accomplished. That the decorative plumage of the male bird is appreciated by himself and is used by him as an attractive presentation to win the favour of the female, must, it seems to me, be taken as an undoubted fact, whether it be the streaming plumes of a Bird of Paradise; the hundred-eyed wing of an Argus Pheasant; the coloured, and, to human notions, somewhat ugly, wattles of a Turkey or Domestic Fowl; the f...