DARWIN. 81 



perfect and as useful as we now see them ; indeed, in 

 several cases we know that this has not been their 

 history. The key is man's power of accumulative 

 selection ; nature gives successive variations ; man adds 

 them up in certain directions useful to him." This is an 

 undoubted fact, to which breeders and fanciers give far 

 more emphatic testimony even than Darwin. As Lord 

 Somerville said, speaking of what breeders have done 

 for sheep, " It would seem as if they had chalked upon 

 a wall a form perfect in itself, and then had given it 

 existence." 



Side by side with conscious selection goes unconscious. 

 Two breeders, breeding from similar stock, aiming at the 

 same end, will get different results. Aiming at a par- 

 ticular result, they find that with it is associated some 

 other of which they had not dreamed. Thus through 

 long ages our cultivated vegetables and flowers have 

 been produced, by always selecting the best variety, and 

 sowing its seeds. The fact which Darwin notes, that our 

 cultivated plants and domestic breeds date from so 

 ancient a time that we know really nothing of their 

 origin, has an important bearing on the great antiquity of 

 man, then scarcely imagined, now generally accepted ; 

 seeing that all domestic development depends on a vari- 

 ability in living creatures, which man can not produce, 

 but can only work upon. 



That variation of species occurs in a state of nature 

 Darwin proves not only by recorded facts, but by a con- 

 sideration of the chaotic condition of species-description, 

 owing to the differences between authors as to what are 

 species and what are varieties, one observer describing a 

 6 



