CONGENITAL VARIATION 105 



character of the young from anything arrived at before 

 often takes place. These variations have no necessary 

 fitness or correspondence to the changed conditions which 

 have produced them. They are, so to speak, departures 

 in all and every direction not very great, but still great 

 enough to be selected by survival if occurring in wild 

 extra-human nature, and obvious enough when pro- 

 duced in cultivated animals and plants to be seen and 

 selected by man, the stock-breeder or fancier. 



Indeed the stock-breeder and horticulturist go to 

 work in this way deliberately. Though when they 

 have fattened an animal or fed up a plant they cannot 

 make it transmit its fatness or increased size to its off- 

 spring, yet they can, by special feeding and change of 

 conditions of life or by cross-breeding break up the 

 fixed tendency or quality of the germs within the 

 parents so treated. Thus they get offspring produced 

 which show strange and unexpected variations of many 

 kinds new feathers, new colours, new shapes of leaf, 

 increased size of root, length of limb all kinds of 

 variations. From the congenital varieties thus produced 

 by " stirring up," " breaking down," or disturbing the 

 germ-matter (germ -plasm) of the parents, the breeder 

 next proceeds to select and mate those which show 

 the character which suits his fancy, whilst he destroys 

 or rejects the others. Thus he establishes, and by 

 repeated selection in every generation maintains, and 

 if he desires increases, the characteristics which he 

 values. 



Birth-variation is then an inherent property of living 

 things (including man) as much as heredity, which is 

 the name for the property expressed in the resemblance 

 of offspring to parent. And birth-variation, or con- 

 genital variation that is to say, the being born with a 

 power to grow into something different (not greatly, 

 but still obviously, different) from their parents or 

 ancestry, and from their brethren and cousins, though 



