THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 55 



to be called original varieties or species (whichever term it 

 may be thought right to apply to them) as any of those which 

 are allowed to rank in the catalogues of the naturalist. The 

 converse opinion, namely, that the forms of living creatures are 

 undergoing perpetual changes, according to the circumstances 

 under which they happen to be placed, has only to be stated 

 in the exaggerated length to which some theorists have carried 

 it, to refute itself by the outrageous shock it gives to experi- 

 ence and common sense. Buffon thus accounts for the exist- 

 ence of various species of Pheasants :-^- a Since no naturalist or 

 traveller has given the least hint concerning the original 

 abode of the Black-and- White (our Silver) Pheasant, we are 

 obliged to form conjectures. I am inclined to suppose that, as 

 the Pheasant of Georgia (the common species of our preserves), 

 having migrated towards the east, and having fixed its resi- 

 dence in the southern or temperate provinces of China, has be- 

 come the Painted (with us Golden) Pheasant, so the White 

 Pheasant, which is an inhabitant of our cold climates, or that 

 of Tartary, having travelled into the northern provinces of 

 China, has become the pencilled or silver kind; that it has 

 there grown to a greater size than the original Pheasant, or 

 that of Georgia, because it has found in those provinces food 

 more plentiful and better suited to its nature ; but that it be- 

 trays the marks of a new climate in its air, port, and external 

 form in all which it resembles the Painted Pheasant, but re- 

 tains of the original Pheasant the red orbits, which have been 

 even expanded from the same causes undoubtedly that pro- 

 moted the growth of its body and gave it a superiority over the 

 ordinary Pheasant." By this sort of gentle transmutation, 

 any one bird may be easily manufactured from any other. 

 Dr. Erasmus Darwin proceeds boldly to the work, and carries 

 it out on a grand scale. " As Linnaeus has conjectured in re- 

 spect to the vegetable world (where ?), it is not impossible but 

 the great variety of species of animals, which now tenant the 



