40 DARWINISM AND RACE PROGRESS. 



In our own country large horses are found in the 

 plains and small horses and ponies in the hilly dis- 

 tricts of Wales and Scotland. But the obvious utility 

 to man of small breeds in hilly districts, and of heavily- 

 built horses on the plains, and the fact that horses 

 have been bred for hundreds of years in view of their 

 services to man, throws great doubt upon this par- 

 ticular evidence of De Quatrefages', and we may well 

 leave it out of account, unaccompanied as it is with 

 evidence as to the total exclusion of the interbreed- 

 ing of the Normandy with the Brittany variety. 



On the other hand, among plants it really appears as 

 if by adjusting the soil and climate you may produce 

 stunted varieties, whose seed produce small plants. The 

 poor and exposed ground of our hilltops are covered 

 with dwarfed varieties of the bigger plants growing 

 luxuriously in the adjacent plains, and a classical case 

 mentioned by Lemaire 1 is that of the hemp which^ 

 removed from Piedmont to the less suitable soil of 

 France, becomes a smaller variety, growing to only 

 half its former height in the course of two or three 

 generations. The enormous dwarfing that one can 

 subject a plant to is illustrated in the case of the 

 conifer, which the Japanese can cause to remain the 

 size of a tiny shrub during its hundred years' growth, 

 by simply keeping the soil at the starvation edge, and 

 by pruning the branches and roots. 



1 D'Orbigny's " Dictionary." 



