The Descent of Man

les of so many animals. With female deer the
development during each recurrent season of
great branching horns, and with female elephants
the development of immense tusks,
would be a great waste of vital power, supposing
that they were of no use to the females.
Consequently, they would have tended to be
eliminated in the female through natural selection;
that is, if the successive variations were
limited in their transmission to the female sex,
for otherwise the weapons of the males would
have been injuriously affected, and this would
have been a greater evil. On the whole, and
from the consideration of the following facts, it
seems probable that when the various weapons
differ in the two sexes, this has generally depended
on the kind of transmission which has
prevailed.
As the reindeer is the one species in the whole
family of Deer, in which the female is furnished
with horns, though they are somewhat smaller,