ARTIFICIAL SELECTION 45 
Yet a remarkable number of new kinds of creatures 
are known to have arisen in this way, and their diver- 
sity is no less astonishing, as a visit to any great show 
of domestic plants or animals will at once demonstrate. 
Here may be seen varieties of pigeons, for example, 
like the carrier, pouter, fantail, and tumbler, which, 
if they were found existing in a wild condition, would 
be placed in separate genera by any ornithologist. 
The domestic races of fowls, dogs, horses, sheep, and 
cattle show scarcely less divergence, and modifications 
no less remarkable have been perpetuated in the case 
of many cultivated species of plants. Whilst these 
types have survived, being deliberately preserved on 
account of their use or beauty or curious appearance, a 
still greater number have doubtless been exterminated, 
either because they did not attract the breeder’s 
favourable attention, or on account of their having 
passed out of fashion. 
Darwin sought in Nature a substitute for the baleful 
judgment of the breeder, and found it in an extension 
of the Malthusian doctrine to organic beings in general. 
The idea which is identified with this expression 
did not, however, originate with Malthus, nor does 
that author claim it as his own, as the following extract 
from the first chapter of the ‘Essay on Population ’ 
will show : 
‘It is observed by Dr. Franklin that there is no bound 
to the prolific nature of animals and plants but what 
is made by their crowding and interfering with each 
other’s means of subsistence. Were the face of the 
earth, he says, vacant of other plants, it might be 
