The Descent of Man

for discovering and securely holding the female,
and for exciting or charming her. When the
sexes differ in these respects, it is also, as we
have seen, an extremely general law that the
adult male differs more or less from the young
male; and we may conclude from this fact that
the successive variations, by which the adult
male became modified, did not generally occur
much before the age for reproduction. Whenever
some or many of the variations occurred
early in life, the young males would partake
more or less of the characters of the adult males;
and differences of this kind between the old
and young males may be observed in many
species of animals.
It is probable that young male animals have
often tended to vary in a manner which would
not only have been of no use to them at an early
age, but would have been actually injurious—
as by acquiring bright colours, which would
render them conspicuous to their enemies, or