DOMESTICATED ORGANISMS. 139 



all probability was a real species ! What a pity Wagner 

 has not given us any information about this important 

 and difficult problem ! 



Now, however ridiculous this view may appear to us, it 

 is only the logical sequence of a false view (which is widely 

 spread) of the special nature of cultivated organisms, and 

 one may occasionally hear similar objections from naturalists 

 of great reputation. I must most decidedly, and at once, 

 condemn this utterly false conception. It is the same per- 

 verseness which is committed by physicians who maintain 

 that diseases are artificial productions, and not natural 

 phenomena. It has been a work of hard labour to combat 

 this prejudice, and it is only in recent times that men have 

 generally adopted the view that diseases are nothing 

 but natural changes of the organisms, or really natural 

 phenomena of life, which are produced by changed and 

 abnormal conditions of existence. Disease, therefore, is not 

 a life beyond Nature's realm (vita prseter naturam), as the 

 early physicians used to say, but a natural life under con- 

 ditions which produce illness and threaten the body with 

 danger. Just in the same manner, cultivated organic forms 

 are not artificial works of man, but natural productions 

 which have arisen under the influence of peculiar conditions 

 of life. Man by his culture can never directly produce a 

 new organic form, but he can breed organisms under new 

 conditions of life, which are such as to influence and trans- 

 form them. All domestic animals and all garden plants 

 are originally descended from wild species, which have been 

 transformed by the peculiar conditions of culture. 



A thorough comparison of cultivated forms (races and 

 varieties) with organisms not altered by cultivation (species 



