Now if this is shown to be the case with breeds the purest of which
have been adapted to their habitats and modes of life during some
few hundred years only, what shall we say when the question is of a
breed which has had a constant mode of life in the same locality for
ten thousand years or more, like the quagga? In this the stability
of constitution must be such as no domestic animal can approach.
Relatively stable as may have been the constitutions of Lord Morton’s
horses, as compared with the constitutions of ordinary horses, yet,
since Arab horses, even in their native country, have probably in the
course of successive conquests and migrations of tribes become more
or less mixed, and since they have been subject to the conditions of
domestic life, differing much from the conditions of their original
wild life, and since the English breed has undergone the perturbing
effects of change from the climate and food of the East to the climate
and food of the West, the organizations of the horse and mare in
question could have had nothing like that perfect balance produced in
the quagga by a hundred centuries of harmonious co-operation. Hence the
result. And hence at the same time the interpretation of the fact that
analogous phenomena are not perceived among domestic animals, or among
ourselves; since both have relatively mixed, and generally extremely
mixed, constitutions, which, as we see in ourselves, have been made
generation after generation, not by the formation of a mean between two
parents, but by the jumbling of traits of the one with traits of the
other, until there exist no such conspiring tendencies among the parts
as cause repetition of combined details of structure in posterity.
Expectation that scepticism might be felt respecting this alleged
anomaly presented by the quagga-marked foal, had led me to think over
the matter; and I had reached this interpretation before sending to the
College of Surgeons Museum (being unable to go myself) to obtain the
particulars and refer to the records. When there was brought to me a
copy of the account as set forth in the “Philosophical Transactions,”
it was joined with the information that there existed an appended
account of pigs, in which a parallel fact had been observed. To my
immediate inquiry—“Was the male a wild pig?”—there came the reply:
“I did not observe.” Of course I forthwith obtained the volume, and
there found what I expected. It was contained in a paper communicated
by Dr. Wollaston from Daniel Giles, Esq., concerning his “sow and her
produce,” which said that
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