Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/122

100 been able to increase them to a marvellous extent by the simple process of always preserving the best varieties to breed from. Along with these larger variations others of smaller amount occasionally appear, sometimes in external, sometimes in internal characters, the very bones of the skeleton often changing slightly in form, size, or number; but as these secondary characters have been of no use to man, and have not been specially selected by him, they have, usually, not been developed to any great amount except when they have been closely dependent on those external characters which he has largely modified.

As man has considered only utility to himself, or the satisfaction of his love of beauty, of novelty, or merely of something strange or amusing, the variations he has thus produced have something of the character of monstrosities. Not only are they often of no use to the animals or plants themselves, but they are not unfrequently injurious to them. In the Tumbler pigeons, for instance, the habit of tumbling is sometimes so excessive as to injure or kill the bird; and many of our highly-bred animals have such delicate constitutions that they are very liable to disease, while their extreme peculiarities of form or structure would often render them quite unfit to live in a wild state. In plants, many of our double flowers, and some fruits, have lost the power of producing seed, and the race can thus be continued only by means of cuttings or grafts. This peculiar character of domestic productions distinguishes them broadly from wild species and varieties, which, as will be seen by and by, are necessarily adapted in every part of their organisation to the conditions under which they have to live. Their importance for our present inquiry depends on their demonstrating the occurrence of incessant slight variations in all parts of an organism, with the transmission to the offspring of the special characteristics of the parents; and also, that all such slight variations are capable of being accumulated by selection till they present very large and important divergencies from the ancestral stock.

We thus see, that the evidence as to variation afforded by animals and plants under domestication strikingly accords with that which we have proved to exist in a state of nature.