Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/123

iv And it is not at all surprising that it should be so, since all the species were in a state of nature when first domesticated or cultivated by man, and whatever variations occur must be due to purely natural causes. Moreover, on comparing the variations which occur in any one generation of domesticated animals with those which we know to occur in wild animals, we find no evidence of greater individual variation in the former than in the latter. The results of man's selection are more striking to us because we have always considered the varieties of each domestic animal to be essentially identical, while those which we observe in a wild state are held to be essentially diverse. The greyhound and the spaniel seem wonderful, as varieties of one animal produced by man's selection; while we think little of the diversities of the fox and the wolf, or the horse and the zebra, because we have been accustomed to look upon them as radically distinct animals, not as the results of nature's selection of the varieties of a common ancestor.