30 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



years, and devotes his lifetime to it with indomitable 

 perseverance, he will succeed, and may make gTeat 

 improvements ; if he wants any of these qualities, he 

 will assuredly fail. Few would readily believe in the 

 natural capacity and years of practice requisite to be- 

 come even a skilful pigeon-fancier. 



The same principles are followed by horticulturists ; 

 but the variations are here often more abrupt. No one 

 supposes that our choicest productions have been pro- 

 duced by a single variation from the aboriginal stock. 

 We have proofs that this is not so in some cases, in 

 which exact records have been kept ; thus, to give a 

 very trifling instance, the steadily- increasing size of 

 the common gooseberry may be quoted. We see an 

 astonishing improvement in many florists' flowers, 

 when the flowers of the present day are compared with 

 drawings made only twenty or thirty years ago. When 

 a race of plants is once pretty well established, the 

 seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely 

 go over their seed-beds, and pull up the 'rogues,' as 

 they call the plants that deviate from the proper 

 standard. With animals this kind of selection is, in 

 fact, also followed ; for hardly any one is so careless as 

 to allow his worst animals to breed. 



In regard to plants, there is another means of ob- 

 serving the accumulated effects of selection — namely, 

 by comparing the diversity of flowers in the different 

 varieties of the same species in the flower-garden ; the 

 diversity of leaves, pods, or tubers, or whatever part is 

 valued, in the kitchen-garden, in comparison with 

 the flowers of the same varieties ; and the diversity 

 of fruit of the same species in the orchard, in com- 

 parison with the leaves and flowers of the same set 

 of varieties. See how different the leaves of the 

 cabbage are, and how extremely alike the flowers ; how 

 unlike the flowers of the heartsease are, and how alike 

 the leaves ; how much the fruit of the different kinds 

 of gooseberries differ in size, colour, shape, and hairi- 

 ness, and yet the flowers present very slight differences. 

 It is not that the varieties which differ largely in some 



