642 The American Naturalist. [July, 
to Turdus; it being claimed that Merula has been evolved from 
and is one plain above Turdus, and that the spotted breast of the 
young robin is a transitory inheritance of the acquired mark- 
ings of the rest of the thrush family. If this be so, then, as all 
screech-owls are gray in the down, from which those destined 
to be red, afterwards acquire their plumage at the first moult; 
does it not follow that the aboriginal bird was gray, whose 
prominent and characteristic markings are reproduced in 
every brood of young? While on the other hand, if the down 
of young birds were red, from which the gray birds appeared 
after the moult, the whole theory would be overturned, but it 
is hardly necessary to state that this is not the case; and the 
fact that gray birds are extremely rare in some regions, and 
wholly wanting in others, seems conclusive proof that the 
gray form is gradually becoming extinct over certain areas. 
He who believes that each variety of pigeon known to 
fanciers has been independently created, and that the various 
color phases exhibited by individuals of the same species are 
without meaning and without purpose, will probably assert 
that each species has been created with a tendency to vary 
both under nature and under domestication, each in its own 
particular manner, so as often to become marked like other 
species of the same genus, and that a species has been created 
with a strong tendency to produce young not the color of their 
parents, but other forms closely connected. To admit this view 
seems, as Darwin aptly says, “To reject a real for an 
unreal, or at least for an unknown cause. It makes the works 
of God a mere mockery and deception," and *I would almost 
as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists that 
fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so 
as to mock the shells living on the seashore.” While, on the 
the other hand, both geology and paleontology plainly pro- 
claim that old forms have been supplanted by new and 
improved forms of life, the product of “variation” and the 
survival of the fittest. 
