attle; racers, hunters, coach horses, dray horses, and
ponies; short-horns and long-horns, Devons and Herefords, polled
galloways and Shetlands; how unlike are the unimproved breeds of cattle
as they existed a century ago before the march of agricultural
improvement began, and how different were most of these as then existing
in what may be called the normal state from the wild cattle produced in
Chillington Park. It has been found, however, when external and
artificial conditions are removed, and these different breeds are
allowed to run wild, as in the Pampas and Australia, no matter what the
diversity of size, shape, and colour of the domestic breeds, they
reverted in their wild state, in these respects, to their primitive
types.

So again with regard to cultivated vegetables and flowers. How different
are the species of the red cabbage and the cauliflower; who would have
expected them to be varieties of the wild _brassica oleracea_? Yet from
that they have been derived by cultivation. They have, however, a
tendency like animals to revert to the original type, or, in the
gardener's phrase, to degenerate, which it requires the utmost care on
his part to counteract. When left to a state of nature, they speedily
lose their acquired forms, properties and character, and regain those of
the original species.

If species be permanent--if no education or training can educe new
kinds--if the higher classes of animals are not the results of
meliorations of the lower--whence did they come? This question we are
not bound to answer. It might be as reasonably asked, whence did the
lower classes come? Geology, like other sciences, does not conduct us to
the _beginning_, it only takes up creation at certain ulterior stages of
development. The changes and construction of the globe may have been
different in different parts; it has not been proved that geological
revolutions have been either universal or contemporary. There may have
been climates and regions adapted to the existence of the higher class
of land animals, while contemporarily therewith other portions of the
globe might be undergoing changes beneath the ocean. It is not
improbable that the human species dwelt nearly stationary for ages on
the old continents of Africa and Asia, while Europe and America were
covered with water. Supposing these new continents formed, either by the
gradual subsidence of the sea or the rising of its bed, successive
inhabitants would follow i