DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 261 



usually meant when animal breeding is spoken of. And 

 our modern hosts of kinds or races of domesticated animals, 

 the scores of sorts of dogs and cats and cows and pigeons 

 and ducks have all been produced by "breeding." The 

 acts of choosing and hybridizing and choosing again and 

 rearing from these chosen offspring and again from 

 each following generation until a form is arrived at very 

 different in appearance or habit from the original ancestor 

 are called also artificial selection. It was largely on a basis 

 of his observations of the methods and results of artificial 

 selection that Charles Darwin founded his great theory 

 of natural selection, which, is, simply, that Nature uncon- 

 sciously chooses or selects among animal and plant indi- 

 viduals and kinds through the survival and producing of 

 young by those types born with traits advantageous in the 

 struggle for existence, this struggle being inevitable on 

 account of the geometrical ration by which animals multiply. 



The art of the animal breeder has reached in these later 

 days, the days since Darwin particularly, a very high stage 

 of development. It is becoming a science, because the 

 breeders are studying the laws of variation and heredity 

 and making their hybridizations on a basis of the scientific 

 knowledge of these laws. 



There is in our country a large association of animal and 

 plant breeders known as the American Breeders' Associa- 

 tion, the reports of whose meetings with the discussions and 

 prefaced papers presented at them are books of true science. 

 Such men as Luther Burbank have given the science of 

 breeding a popular fame and familiarity that was not known 

 a half century ago. 



An important thing to note in connection with animal 

 breeding and artificial selection is that the selecting and 

 modifying is all made to change the animals along lines 

 wholly determined by man; lines that make the animals 

 more useful or pleasing or curious to us but not better fitted 



