IV 
VARIATION UNDER DOMESTICATION 
97 
and Mr. Burgess. Mr. Youatt, one of the greatest authorities 
on breeding domestic animals, says: “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. Bakewell’s original 
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.” In this case there was no 
desire to deviate from the original breed, and the difference 
must have arisen from some slight difference of taste or judg¬ 
ment in selecting, each year, the parents for the next year’s 
stock, combined perhaps with some direct effect of the slight 
differences of climate and soil on the two farms. 
Most of our domesticated animals and cultivated plants 
have come to us from the earliest seats of civilisation in 
Western Asia or Egypt, and have therefore been the subjects 
of human care and selection for some thousands of years, the 
result being that, in many cases, we do not know the wild 
stock from which they originally sprang. The horse, the 
camel, and the common bull and cow are nowhere found in a 
wild state, and they have all been domesticated from remote 
antiquity. The original of the domestic fowl is still wild in 
India and the Malay Islands, and it was domesticated in India 
and China before 1400 B.C. It was introduced into Europe 
about 600 B.c. Several distinct breeds were known to the 
Romans about the commencement of the Christian era, and 
they have since spread all over the civilised world and been 
subjected to a vast amount of conscious and unconscious 
selection, to many varieties of climate and to differences of 
food ; the result being seen in the wonderful diversity of breeds 
which differ quite as remarkably as do the different races of 
pigeons already described. 
In the vegetable kingdom, most of the cereals — wheat, 
barley, etc. — are unknown as truly wild plants ; and the same 
is the case with many vegetables, for De Candolle states that 
out of 157 useful cultivated plants thirty-two are quite un¬ 
known in a wild state, and that forty more are of doubtful 
origin. It is not improbable that most of these do exist 
wild, but they have been so profoundly changed by thousands 
of years of cultivation as to be quite unrecognisable. The 
H 
