The Conditions of Existence as Affecting the Perpetuation of Living Beings: Lecture V. (of VI.), "Lectures to Working Men", at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863, on Darwin's Work: "Origin of Species"Huxley, Thomas Henry
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The Conditions of Existence as Affecting the Perpetuation of Living Beings: Lecture V. (of VI.), "Lectures to Working Men", at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1863, on Darwin's Work: "Origin of Species"
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882. On the origin of species; Evolution (Biology)
and a great many other peculiarities; while the best authorities on
the wild Horses of South America tell you that there is no similarity
between their wild Horses and those of Asia Minor; the cut of their
heads is very different, and they are commonly chestnut or bay-coloured.
It is quite clear, therefore, that as by these facts there ought to
have been two primitive stocks, they go for nothing in support of the
assumption that races recur to one primitive stock, and so far as this
evidence is concerned, it falls to the ground.
Suppose for a moment that it were so, and that domesticated races, when
turned wild, did return to some common condition, I cannot see that this
would prove much more than that similar conditions are likely to produce
similar results; and that when you take back domesticated animals into
what we call natural conditions, you do exactly the same thing as if you
carefully undid all the work you had gone through, for the purpose of
bringing the animal from its wild to its domesticated state. I do not
see anything very wonderful in the fact, if it took all that trouble to
get it from a wild state, that it should go back into its original state
as soon as you removed the conditions which produced the variation to
the domesticated form. There is an important fact, however, forcibly
brought forward by Mr. Darwin, which has been noticed in connection with
the breeding of domesticated pigeons; and it is, that however different
these breeds of pigeons may be from each other, and we have already
noticed the great differences in these breeds, that if, among any of
those variations, you chance to have a blue pigeon turn up, it will be
sure to have the black bars across the wings, which are characteristic
of the original wild stock, the Rock Pigeon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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