 Wallace both "ignored Darwin's problem" (ornamentation) and "denied Darwin's solution" (female choice rather than natural selection).Instead, Ridley observes, Cronin explains that Wallace preferred the explanation that peacock's tails "crop up almost automatically"; he believed that female choice was both unnecessary and impossible.Ridley finds Cronin "quite amusing as she reviews the 'misogynistic opinion' of the critics of female choice", citing Cronin's example of the universally unpleasant 19th century anti-Darwinian St. George Mivart, "such is the instability of a vicious feminine caprice, that no constancy of coloration could be produced by its selective action."