Of these two hypotheses, the first has the weight and majority of authoritative adherents. It declares that all the different kinds of Cats, for example, were distinct and independent creations, each species being originally what we see it to be now, and what it will continue to be as long as it exists: lions, panthers, pumas, leopards, tigers, jaguars, ocelots, and domestic cats, being so many _original stocks_, and not so many _divergent forms of one original stock_. The second hypothesis declares that all these kinds of cats represent divergencies of the original stock, precisely as the Varieties of each kind represent the divergencies of each Species. It is true that each species, when once formed, only admits of limited variations; any cause which should push the variation _beyond_ certain limits would destroy the species,—because by species is meant the group of animals contained _within_ those limits. Let us suppose the original stock from which all these kinds of cats have sprung, to have become modified into lions, leopards, and tigers—in other words, that the gradual accumulation of divergencies has resulted in the whole family of cats existing under these three forms. The lions will form a distinct species; this species varies, and in the course of long variation a new species, the puma, rises by the side of it. The leopards also vary, and let us suppose their variation at length assumes so marked a form,—in the ocelot,—that we class it as a new species. There is nothing in this hypothesis but what is strictly consonant with analogies; it is only extending to Species what we know to be the fact with respect to Varieties; and these Varieties which we know to have been produced from one and the same Species are often more widely separated from each other than the lion is from the puma, or the leopard from the ocelot. Mr. Darwin remarks that “at least a score of pigeons might be chosen, which, if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were wild birds, would certainly, I think, be ranked by him as well-defined species. Moreover, I do not believe that any ornithologist would place the English carrier, the short-faced tumbler, the runt, the barb, the pouter and fantail in the same genus! more especially as in each of these breeds several truly-inherited sub-breeds or species, as he might have called them, could be shown him.”