104 ACQUIRED CHARACTERS sec. 



any assistance from selection : ultimately, in fact, all of these 

 characters owe their orig^in either to the direct influence of 

 changed conditions of life, or to correlation. 



I will mention some examples in which selection is excluded. 

 A particularly striking one has recently been communicated 

 to me by a German landowner who is a large breeder of 

 cattle and sheep. He assures me that by feeding the lambs 

 with powdered bones he has obtained in a few years a race of 

 sheep of much greater weight, more massive skeleton, and 

 larger in size than the original form. In this case selection 

 was not employed. 



Another similar example is this, that the feathers of 

 domesticated ostriches, according to the statements of experts, 

 are heavier than the wild, and for this reason that the quills are 

 thicker. In consequence of this a given weight of the feathers 

 of domesticated ostriches fetches a smaller price than of 

 the wild. 



Other examples of characters acquired and inherited 

 through cultivation without the assistance of adaptation I 

 shall bring forward in the next section. 



We have to consider next the already mentioned case of 

 the crustacean Artemia salina, as a proof of the change of 

 one species into another in a state of nature through a change 

 in the saltness of the water. 



The little crustacean Artemia salina, which occurs in our 

 salt inland waters, acquires, through diminution of the saltness 

 of the water in which it lives, the characters of the fresh-water 

 genus Branchipus, among them a nine-jointed instead of an 

 eight-jointed abdomen; but through increase in the saltness it 

 becomes transformed into the species Artemia Milhausenii, 

 which lives in the Crimea, and this on diminution of the 

 saltness conversely into Artemia salina. 



As with the Axolotl this single example alone speaks 

 forcibly in favour of the view I am advocating. 



