tured to speak as strongly as I have
done in the final paragraphs of my discourse.

Thus, my daw having so many borrowed plumes, I see no impropriety in
making a tail to this brief paper by taking another handful of feathers
from Mr. Darwin; endeavouring to point out in a few words, in fact,
what, as I gather from the perusal of his book, his doctrines really
are, and on what sort of basis they rest. And I do this the more
willingly, as I observe that already the hastier sort of critics have
begun, not to review my friend's book, but to howl over it in a manner
which must tend greatly to distract the public mind.

No one will be better satisfied than I to see Mr. Darwin's book refuted,
if any person be competent to perform that feat; but I would
suggest that refutation is retarded, not aided, by mere sarcastic
misrepresentation. Every one who has studied cattle-breeding, or turned
pigeon-fancier, or "pomologist," must have been struck by the extreme
modifiability or plasticity of those kinds of animals and plants which
have been subjected to such artificial conditions as are imposed by
domestication. Breeds of dogs are more different from one another than
are the dog and the wolf; and the purely artificial races of pigeons,
if their origin were unknown, would most assuredly be reckoned by
naturalists as distinct species and even genera.

These breeds are always produced in the same way. The breeder selects
a pair, one or other, or both, of which present an indication of the
peculiarity he wishes to perpetuate, and then selects from the offspring
of them those which are most characteristic, rejecting the others. From
the selected offspring he breeds again, and, taking the same precautions
as before, repeats the process until he has obtained the precise degree
of divergence from the primitive type at which he aimed.

If he now breeds from the variety thus established for some generations,
taking care always to keep the stock pure, the tendency to produce this
particular variety becomes more and more strongly hereditary; and it
does not appear that there is any limit to the persistency of the race
thus developed.

Men like Lamarck, apprehending these facts, and knowing that varieties
comparable to those produced by the breeder are abundantly found in
nature, and finding it impossible to discriminate in some cases between
varieties and true species, could hardly fail to divine the possibility
that species even the most