288 NATURAL HISTORY. 



selection by protecting certain individuals of a species 

 in the struggle for existence, and affording them assistance 

 which they could not have had in a wild state. The 

 individuals of the Wild Boar, for example, have to face 

 the rigid and merciless operation of the law of natural 

 selection, and the weakest therefore go to the wall. The 

 individuals of the Domestic Pig the same animal really 

 as the wild boar are so far relieved from the action 

 of the law of natural selection, that man feeds them 

 when they are hungry, protects them from the cold 

 artificially, and, so far as he can, cures them when they 

 are ill. Man does of course the same thing to the 

 weaker individuals of his own species, and all such 

 things as poor-laws and the like are, in the Darwinian 

 sense, attempts on the part of man to defeat or neutralise 

 the operation of * natural selection.' In the case of 

 many varieties of our domestic animals, it is certain that 

 man's interference has gone so far as to render them 

 wholly incapable of facing the law of natural selection 

 in its untempered severity. In other words, there are 

 many of our domesticated breeds of animals which would 

 infallibly become exterminated if they were turned loose 

 to make their own living, and if the protecting hand of 

 man were wholly withdrawn from them. 



Man, however, not only protects domestic animals in 

 this way from the direct action of surrounding conditions, 

 but at the same time exercises, on his own behalf, a 

 sort of 'selection,' analogous to 'natural selection/ but 

 necessarily operating within much narrower limits, and 

 also exercised in a much more arbitrary fashion. Darwin 

 has given a masterly exposition of the whole of this 



