"140 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
and varieties), is of the utmost importance to the theory of 
selection. What is most surprising in such a comparison is 
the remarkably short time in which man can produce a 
new form, and the high degree in which this form, pro- 
duced by man, can deviate from the original form. While 
wild animals and plants, one year after another, appear 
to the zoologist and botanist approximately in the same 
form, so as to have given rise to the false doctrine of the 
constancy of species, domestic animals and garden plants, 
.on the other hand, display the greatest changes within a 
few years. The perfection which gardeners and farmers 
have attained in the art of selection now enables them, in 
the space of a few years, arbitrarily to create entirely new 
animal and vegetable forms. For this purpose it is only 
necessary to keep and propagate the organism under the 
influence of special conditions—which are capable of pro- 
ducing new formations—and even at the end of a few 
generations new species may be obtained, which differ from 
the original form in a much higher degree than so-called 
good species in. a wild state differ from one another. This 
fact is extremely important, and we cannot lay sufficient 
stress upon it. The assertion is not true that cultivated 
forms descended from one and the same primary form do 
not differ from one another as much as wild animal and 
vegetable species differ among themselves. If we only make 
comparisons, without prejudice, we can very easily perceive 
that a number of races or varieties which have been derived 
from a single cultivated form, within a short series of years, 
differ from one another in a higher degree than so-called 
good species (bone species), or even different genera of one 
fainily, in the wild state. 
/ 
