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Dunstan Times, Issue 303, 14 February 1868, Page 3

The Way To Beauty.—The highest exercise of natural selection is of courseseen when stock breeders and an mal fanciers take the case in hand ; but, as Mr Darwin shows, other selective influences are at work even among savages. Thus, when famine oppresses the natives of Terra del Fuogo, they kill and cook and eat their old women ra her than their dogs ; and when the old women are all consumed, and dogs must be eaten, the natives select for killing dogs of inferior breed. In the vegetable kin.Mom, the result of natural selection is not less marked than in animals.. By resolutely preserving the best individuals by crossing, the last improvement of many fruits and flowers and vegetables has come about. The wild pear, for example, is more indifferent eating than the wild apple ; even the Italian cultivated pear in Pliny’s time seems to have been very poor fruit. The wild cabbage is hardly more im portaut than the watercress to the natu al family of which—the “ brassicaoeas or cruciform ” —it belongs. The thought must frequently have occurred when studying the transmission and fixation of individ. ual traits, whether by processes of select ion occurring naturally, or by the animalfancier or stock-breeder's art, that if the same care were applied to human match making, then the human progeny might be developed to a higher degree of excellence than that in which wo find it. If human tendencies and predilections were allowed to follow their bent, a process of natural election conducive to thi physical well being of humanity would be continually going on. Flatus rigs the matrimonial raarket ( converting what nature had proclaimed free and open const!tueaeos into venal pock ct boroughs. Terminus also comes on the scene, it being one of the great points of I i ndent Christian matrimony now that properties of bride and bridegroom shoul 1 adjoin, or better, lie within one ring fence. Christian folks marry now and are given in marriage without any thought of Darwinian principles. Pru 'cut marriages have come to signify money-prudence, no more. Improving the present occasion, whilst the Sultan’s memory lingers amongst us, in the odour of sanctity, so to speak, it may be permissible to give expression to a certain sentiment that, under other circumstances and at another season, might seem uuauthodox. Speculating on ultimate causes, may it not be permissible to assume that the religion of Islam might have been permitted po the end of improving the human race, through application of principles of natural selection. It has over been the practice with Moslems to take care that their children should have goo 1 looking mammas. Absolved from the slavery of our social system—the slavery of contemn, nous estates an 1 eligible dowries—Moslems go lo market and buy their wiv s, choosing {he handsomest within their means. On the Osmanli Turks the effect in the course of the few centuries they have taken up their abode in Europe has taken up their abode in Europe has Income manifest. Ladies are mostlv of opinion that iho Sultan is a good looking gentleman, and, so far as a man can understand ihe points of male beautv. the ladies wi n’d roem Tp be right. See, then, "hat may come from human Darwinianism, dirtier lly a] pliedy through only a few centuries ! The Osinimli Turks had no good lot ks to boast of originally. They were a race of ugly Mongolions, with high check bones and flat noses and enormous mouths, like the wild Turcomans who roam to day over the Assyrian Plains. So firmly rooted, in Biuenienbach’s time, was the opinion of the Caucasian origin of Turks, that in his physiology ho thought well to contra ict it. They were of Mongolian race ; ugly to begin with, but improved into comeliness by prudent marriages ou Darwinian principles of natural selection.— “ Tinsley’s Magazine.”