UNCONSCIOUS SELECTION. 29 



By a similar process of selection, and by careful training, 

 English race-horses have come to surpass in fleetness and 

 size the parent Arabs, so that the latter, by the regulations 

 for the Goodwood Races, are favored in the weights which 

 they carry. Lord Spencer and others have shown how the 

 cattle of England have increased in weight and in edrly 

 maturity, compared with the stock formerly kept in this 

 country. By comparing the accounts given in various old 

 treatises of the former and present state of carrier and 

 tumbler pigeons in Britain, India, and Persia, we can trace 

 the stages through which they have insensibly passed, and 

 come to differ so greatly from the rock-pigeon. 



Youatt gives an excellent illustration of the effects of a 

 course of selection which may be considered as unconscious, 

 in so far that the breeders could never have expected or 

 even wished, to produce the result which ensued — namely, 

 the production of the distinct strains. Two flocks of 

 Leicester sheep kept by Mr. Buckley and Mr. Burgess, as 

 Mr. Youatt remarks, "have been purely bred from the 

 original stock of Mr. Bakewell for upward of fifty years. 

 There is not a suspicion existing in the mind of any 

 one at all acquainted with the subject, that the owner of 

 either of them has deviated in any one instance from the 

 pure blood of Mr. BakewelFs flock, and yet the difference 

 between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so 

 great that they have the appearance of being quite different 

 varieties." 



If there exist savages so barbarous as never to think of 

 the inherited character of the offspring of their domestic 

 animals, yet any one animal particularly useful to them, 

 for any special purpose, would be carefully preserved dur- 

 ing famines and other accidents, to which savages are so 

 liable, and such choice animals would thuj generally leave 

 more offspring than the inferior ones ; so that in this case 

 there would be a kind of unconscious selection going on. 

 We see the value set on animals even by the barbarians 

 of Tierra del Fuego, by their killing and devouring their 

 old women, in times of dearth, as of less value than their 

 dogs. 



In plants the same gradual process of improvement 

 through the occasional preservation of the best individuals, 

 whether or not sufficiently distinct to be ranked at their 

 first appearance as distinct varieties, and whether or not 

 two or more species or races have become blended together 



