rn.] THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 2G1) 



whose skeleton was presented to Sir Joseph Banks. "VVe 

 believe that, for many years, no remnant of it has existed 

 in the United States. 



Gratio Kelleia was not the progenitor of a race of six- 

 fingered men, as Seth Wright's ram became a nation of 

 Ancon sheep, though the tendency of the variety to 

 perpetutate itself appears to have been fully as strong, in 

 the one case as in the other. And the reason of the 

 difference is not far to seek. Seth Wright took care not 

 to weaken the Ancon blood by matching his Ancon ewes 

 with any but males of the same variety, while Gratio 

 Kelleia's sons were too far removed from the patriarchal 

 times to intermarry with their sisters ; and his grand- 

 children seem not to have been attracted by their six- 

 fingered cousins. In other words, in the one example a 

 race was produced, because, for several generations, care 

 was taken to select both parents of the breeding stock 

 from animals exhibiting a tendency to vary in the same 

 direction ; while, in the other, no race was evolved, because 

 no such selection was exercised. A race is a propagated 

 variety ; and as, by the laws of reproduction, offspring 

 tend to assume the parental forms, they will be more 

 likely to propagate a variation exhibited by both parents 

 than that possessed by only one. 



There is no organ of the body of an animal which 

 may not, and does not, occasionally, vary more or less 

 from the normal type ; and there is no variation which 

 may not be transmitted, and which, if selectively trans- 

 mitted, may not become the foundation of a race. This 

 great truth, sometimes forgotten by philosophers, has 

 long been familiar to practical agriculturists and breeders ; 

 and upon it rest all the methods of improving the breeds 

 of domestic animals, which, for the last century, have 

 been followed with so much success in England. Colour, 

 form, size, texture of hair or wool, proportions of various 



