The Origin of Species | Page 9

time."--'Philosophical Transactions', 1813, Pt. I. pp.
89, 90.
By taking care to select Ancons of both sexes, for breeding from, it
thus became easy to establish an extremely well-marked race; so
peculiar that, even when herded with other sheep, it was noted that the
Ancons kept together. And there is every reason to believe that the
existence of this breed might have been indefinitely protracted; but the
introduction of the Merino sheep, which were not only very superior to
the Ancons in wool and meat, but quite as quiet and orderly, led to the
complete neglect of the new breed, so that, in 1813, Colonel
Humphreys found it difficult to obtain the specimen, whose skeleton
was presented to Sir Joseph Banks. We believe that, for many years, no
remnant of it has existed in the United States.
Gratio Kelleia was not the progenitor of a race of six-fingered men, as
Seth Wright's ram became a nation of Ancon sheep, though the
tendency of the variety to perpetuate itself appears to have been fully as
strong in the one case as in the other. And the reason of the difference
is not far to seek. Seth Wright took care not to weaken the Ancon blood
by matching his Ancon ewes with any but males of the same variety,
while Gratio Kelleia's sons were too far removed from the patriarchal
times to intermarry with their sisters; and his grandchildren seem not to
have been attracted by their six-fingered cousins. In other words, in the
one example a race was produced, because, for several generations,
care was taken to 'select' both parents of the breeding stock from
animals exhibiting a tendency to vary in the same condition; while, in
the other, no race was evolved, because no such selection was exercised.
A race is a propagated variety; and as, by the laws of reproduction,
offspring tend to assume the parental forms, they will be more likely to
propagate a variation exhibited by both parents than that possessed by
only one.
There is no organ of the body of an animal which may not, and does
not, occasionally, vary more or less from the normal type; and there is
no variation which may not be transmitted and which, if selectively

transmitted, may not become the foundation of a race. This great truth,
sometimes forgotten by philosophers, has long been familiar to
practical agriculturists and breeders; and upon it rest all the methods of
improving the breeds of domestic animals, which, for the last century,
have been followed with so much success in England. Colour, form,
size, texture of hair or wool, proportions of various parts, strength or
weakness of constitution, tendency to fatten or to remain lean, to give
much or little milk, speed, strength, temper, intelligence, special
instincts; there is not one of these characters whose transmission is not
an every-day occurrence within the experience of cattle-breeders,
stock-farmers, horse-dealers, and dog and poultry fanciers. Nay, it is
only the other day that an eminent physiologist, Dr. Brown-Sequard,
communicated to the Royal Society his discovery that epilepsy,
artificially produced in guinea-pigs, by a means which he has
discovered, is transmitted to their offspring.
But a race, once produced, is no more a fixed and immutable entity
than the stock whence it sprang; variations arise among its members,
and as these variations are transmitted like any others, new races may
be developed out of the pre-existing one 'ad infinitum', or, at least,
within any limit at present determined. Given sufficient time and
sufficiently careful selection, and the multitude of races which may
arise from a common stock is as astonishing as are the extreme
structural differences which they may present. A remarkable example
of this is to be found in the rock-pigeon, which Dr. Darwin has, in our
opinion, satisfactorily demonstrated to be the progenitor of all our
domestic pigeons, of which there are certainly more than a hundred
well-marked races. The most noteworthy of these races are, the four
great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters, carriers, and
fantails; birds which not only differ most singularly in size, colour, and
habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull: in the proportions of
the beak to the skull; in the number of tail-feathers; in the absolute and
relative size of the feet; in the presence or absence of the uropygial
gland; in the number of vertebrae in the back; in short, in precisely
those characters in which the genera and species of birds differ from
one another.

And it is most remarkable and instructive to observe, that none of these
races can be shown to have been originated by the action of changes in
what are commonly called external circumstances, upon the wild
rock-pigeon. On the contrary, from time immemorial, pigeon-fanciers