Monstrosities 



duced perfect, as that a complex machine 

 should have been invented by a man in a 

 perfect state. Under domestication monstrosities 

 sometimes occur which resemble normal struc- 

 tures in widely different animals. Thus pigs 

 have occasionally been born with a sort of 

 proboscis, and if any wild species of the same 

 genus had naturally possessed a proboscis, it 

 might have been argued that this had appeared 

 as a monstrosity ; but I have as yet failed to 

 find, after diligent search, cases of monstrosities 

 resembling normal structures in nearly allied 

 forms, and these alone bear on the question. If 

 monstrous forms of this kind ever do appear in a 

 state of nature and are capable of reproduction 

 (which is not always the case), as they occur 

 rarely and singly, their preservation would de- 

 pend on unusually favourable circumstances. 

 They would, also, during the first and succeeding 

 generations cross with the ordinary form, and 

 thus their abnormal character would almost 

 inevitably be lost." But, in a later edition of the 

 Origin of Species, Darwin seems to contradict 

 the above assertion : " It should not, however, 

 be overlooked that certain rather strongly marked 

 variations, which no one would rank as mere 

 individual differences, frequently recur owing to 

 a similar organisation being similarly acted on 

 of which fact numerous instances could be given 

 with our domestic productions. In such cases, 



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