Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/105

Rh of food or training, since it is by selection alone that our various breeds of domestic animals have in most cases been produced.

On the other hand, the person who undertook to produce similar results by food and training alone, without allowing selection to have any part in the process, would have to act in a very different manner. He would first divide his horses into two lots as nearly as possible identical in all points, and thereafter subject the one lot to daily exercise in drawing loads at a slow pace, the other lot to equally constant exercise in running, and he might also supply them with different kinds of food if he thought it calculated to aid in producing the required effect. In each successive generation he must make no selection of the swiftest or the strongest, but must either keep the whole progeny of each lot, or carefully choose an average sample of each to be again subjected to the same discipline. It is quite certain that the very different kinds of exercise would have some effect on the individuals so trained, enlarging and strengthening a different set of muscles in each, and if this effect were transmitted to the offspring, then there ought to be in this case also a steady advance toward the racer and the cart-horse type. Such an experiment, however, has never been tried, and we can not therefore say positively what would be the result; but those who accept the theory of the non-heredity of acquired characters would predict with confidence that after thirty or forty generations of training without selection, the last two lots of colts would have made little or no advance toward the two types required, but would be practically indistinguishable.

It is exceedingly difficult to find any actual cases to illustrate this point, since either natural or artificial selection has almost always been present. The apparent effects of disuse in causing the diminution of certain organs, such as the reduced wings of some birds in oceanic islands and the very small or aborted eyes of some of the animals inhabiting extensive caverns, can be as well explained by the withdrawal of the cumulative agency of natural selection and by economy of growth, as by the direct effects of disuse. The following facts, however, seem to show that special skill derived from practice, when continued for several generations, is not inherited, and does not therefore tend to increase. The wonderful skill of most of the North American Indians in following a trail by indications quite imperceptible to the ordinary European has been dwelt upon by many writers, but it is now admitted that the white trappers equal and often excel them, though these trappers have in almost every case acquired their skill in a comparatively short period, without any of the inherited experience which might belong to the Indian.