ble to the general reader in our own
way.

The Baker-street Bazaar has just been exhibiting its familiar annual
spectacle. Straight-backed, small-headed, big-barrelled oxen, as
dissimilar from any wild species as can well be imagined, contended for
attention and praise with sheep of half-a-dozen different breeds and
styes of bloated preposterous pigs, no more like a wild boar or sow than
a city alderman is like an ourang-outang. The cattle show has been, and
perhaps may again be, succeeded by a poultry show, of whose crowing and
clucking prodigies it can only be certainly predicated that they will
be very unlike the aboriginal 'Phasianus gallus'. If the seeker after
animal anomalies is not satisfied, a turn or two in Seven Dials will
convince him that the breeds of pigeons are quite as extraordinary
and unlike one another and their parent stock, while the Horticultural
Society will provide him with any number of corresponding vegetable
aberrations from nature's types. He will learn with no little surprise,
too, in the course of his travels, that the proprietors and producers
of these animal and vegetable anomalies regard them as distinct species,
with a firm belief, the strength of which is exactly proportioned to
their ignorance of scientific biology, and which is the more remarkable
as they are all proud of their skill in ORIGINATING such "species."

On careful inquiry it is found that all these, and the many other
artificial breeds or races of animals and plants, have been produced
by one method. The breeder--and a skilful one must be a person of much
sagacity and natural or acquired perceptive faculty--notes some slight
difference, arising he knows not how, in some individuals of his stock.
If he wish to perpetuate the difference, to form a breed with the
peculiarity in question strongly marked, he selects such male and female
individuals as exhibit the desired character, and breeds from them.
Their offspring are then carefully examined, and those which exhibit
the peculiarity the most distinctly are selected for breeding, and this
operation is repeated until the desired amount of divergence from the
primitive stock is reached. It is then found that by continuing the
process of selection--always breeding, that is, from well-marked forms,
and allowing no impure crosses to interfere,--a race may be formed, the
tendency of which to reproduce itself is exceedingly strong; nor is the
limit to the amount of divergence wh