cientific evolutionists should thoroughly
explore those regions, investigate the manners and customs of the Yahoos
with the enthusiasm of a true Darwinian, and minutely describe those
interesting features which would enable us to decide whether they are
monkeys progressing to manhood, or men brutalizing into apehood; but
which Mr. Gulliver's lack of scientific enthusiasm for evolution
prevented him from closely examining. But until the scientific standing
of Mr. Gulliver's Yahoos is determined, the theory of evolution must be
assigned to the mountains of speculations, big with expectation, but
which yet await the birth of their first fact.

Mr. Darwin indeed alleges the results of domestication upon animals and
plants, as producing permanent varieties as different in appearance as
many which are ranked by naturalists as different species, and he
alleges that Natural Selection carries on a similar process of
improvement among wild animals and plants.

But the facts of domestication are most emphatic in refusing to
acknowledge any change of species of the most carefully bred animals.
The efforts of breeders have been exerted for thousands of years upon
the dog, the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the ass, the horse, and the
camel, among animals; and upon the goose, the duck, and the pigeon, and
for a shorter time, but still for two thousand years, upon the common
barn-door poultry. Farmers in all lands, since the deluge, have used
their best exertions to improve the cereals, the fruit trees, the vines,
and root crops, and vegetables, and the result has been some valuable
modifications of size, shape, flavor, and fertility; but in no case
whatever has any change of species been effected. All the efforts of
breeders have not succeeded in making the horse specifically different
from the noble animal described in the Book of Job four thousand years
ago. The sheep has not become a goat, nor the goat a sheep, by all the
pains of all the shepherds since the days of Abel. The ass displays not
the least tendency to become a horse, nor the goat to become a cow. Mr.
Darwin makes great capital out of pigeons, enumerating all the varieties
owned by fanciers, and showing how the Indian emperors bred them a
thousand years before Christ. But it is strange that he does not see
that this makes against his theory; since in all that time this most
variable of birds has never been transmuted into any other species. The
pigeon has never been cha