THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. LI 



This fact has led to some entirely unwarranted inclusions 

 in the technical literature of biology. Statements in the 

 agricultural press which were intended by their breeder- 

 authors merely as harmless generalities on a subject 

 about which they had not the slightest intention of being 

 specific, have been accorded, by the laboratory evolu- 

 tionist, the dignity and authority of detailed reports of 

 actual breeding operations, and cited as valuable evidence 

 on the problem of evolution. 



This confusion has played particular havoc in discus- 

 sions of the selection problem because of the general and 

 usually quite irresponsible use of the term ''selection" 

 by practical breeders. In the literature of live stock 

 breeding the word "selection" has been, and is being 

 used to-day, to designate, upon occasion, every known 

 kind of breeding operation. To illustrate : a fancier who 

 bred a new variety of poultry started with a mongrel 

 male bird which happened to possess just the combination 

 of characters which he wanted in his new breed, as the 

 result of a previous series of indiscriminate crossings. 

 This male was crossed with a female of a well established 

 breed which possessed some of the desired characters. 

 The daughters from this mating were back-crossed to 

 their sire, the original male bird, and so in turn were his 

 granddaughters. The granddaughters' progeny consti- 

 tuted the new breed, full blown and breeding tolerably 

 true. This was an entirely legitimate, and indeed usual, 

 way of making a new breed. But the point lies in the fact 

 that the breeder who did all this always refers publicly 

 to the series of matings which has just been described as 

 ''this process of selection"! 



Since Darwin selection has been a word to conjure with 

 amongst the practical breeders. In most cases without 

 any comprehension whatever of the exact technical sense 

 in which the term was originally used breeders have taken 

 the word itself as a sort of fetish. Darwin'^^ himself 

 speaks of artificial selection as "the accumulation in one 

 direction, during successive generations, of differences 



27 Darwin, C, "Origin of Species," Chap. T, p. 26. 



