PROLEGOMENA 55 



of an ideal of utility or beauty. Amidst a multitude of 

 plants, occupying the same station and subjected to the 

 same conditions, in the garden, varieties arise. The 

 varieties tending in a given direction are preserved, and 

 the rest are destroyed. And the same process takes 

 place among the varieties until, for example, the wild 

 kale becomes a cabbage, or the wild Viola tricolor a prize 

 pansy. 



v. 



The process of colonisation presents analogies to the 

 formation of a garden which are highly instructive. 

 Suppose a shipload of English colonists sent to form a 

 settlement, in such a country as Tasmania was in the 

 middle of the last century. On landing, they find them- 

 selves in the midst of a state of nature, widely different 

 from that left behind them in everything but the most 

 general physical conditions. The common plants, the 

 common birds and quadrupeds, are as totally distinct 

 as the men from anything to be seen on the side of the 

 globe from which they come. The colonists proceed to 

 put an end to this state of things over as large an area 

 as they desire to occupy. They clear away the native 

 vegetation, extirpate or drive out the animal population, 

 so far as may be necessary, and take measures to defend 

 themselves from the re-immigration of either. In their 

 place, they introduce English grain) and fruit trees; 

 English dogs, sheep, cattle, horses; and English men; 

 in fact, they set up a new Flora and Fauna and a new 

 variety of mankind, within the old state of nature. 

 Their farms and pastures represent a garden on a great 

 scale, and themselves the gardeners who have to keep 

 it up, in watchful antagonism to the old regime. Con- 





