cion existing in the mind of any one
at all acquainted with the subject that the owner of either of them has
deviated in any one instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell's
original flock, and yet the difference between the sheep possessed by
these two gentlemen is so great that they have the appearance of being
quite different varieties." In this case there was no desire to deviate
from the original breed, and the difference must have arisen from some
slight difference of taste or judgment in selecting, each year, the
parents for the next year's stock, combined perhaps with some direct
effect of the slight differences of climate and soil on the two farms.

Most of our domesticated animals and cultivated plants have come to us
from the earliest seats of civilisation in Western Asia or Egypt, and
have therefore been the subjects of human care and selection for some
thousands of years, the result being that, in many cases, we do not know
the wild stock from which they originally sprang. The horse, the camel,
and the common bull and cow are nowhere found in a wild state, and they
have all been domesticated from remote antiquity. The original of the
domestic fowl is still wild in India and the Malay Islands, and it was
domesticated in India and China before 1400 B.C. It was introduced into
Europe about 600 B.C. Several distinct breeds were known to the Romans
about the commencement of the Christian era, and they have since spread
all over the civilised world and been subjected to a vast amount of
conscious and unconscious selection, to many varieties of climate and to
differences of food; the result being seen in the wonderful diversity of
breeds which differ quite as remarkably as do the different races of
pigeons already described.

In the vegetable kingdom, most of the cereals--wheat, barley, etc.--are
unknown as truly wild plants; and the same is the case with many
vegetables, for De Candolle states that out of 157 useful cultivated
plants thirty-two are quite unknown in a wild state, and that forty more
are of doubtful origin. It is not improbable that most of these do exist
wild, but they have been so profoundly changed by thousands of years of
cultivation as to be quite unrecognisable. The peach is unknown in a
wild state, unless it is derived from the common almond, on which point
there is much difference of opinion among botanists and horticulturists.

The immense antiquity of most of our cultivated plants suff