Previously these had been in a sense mere step-children of biology, inconvenient existences which would not fit properly into the system, which were therefore as far as possible ignored or dismissed as outside the scope of 'the natural,' because it was difficult to know what else to do with them. I can quite well remember that, even as a boy, I was struck by the fact that one could find nothing in the systematic books about the many well-established garden forms of plants, or about our domestic animals, which seemed to be regarded as in a sense artificial products, and as such not worthy of scientific consideration. But it was in these that Darwin particularly interested himself, making them virtually the basis of his theory, for he led up from them to the very principle of transformation, which was his most important addition to the earlier presentations of the Evolution theory. He started from the existence of varieties which may be observed in so many wild species. His line of thought was somewhat as follows: If species have really arisen through a gradual process of transformation, then varieties must be regarded as possible first steps towards new species; if, therefore, we can only succeed in finding out the causes which underlie the formation of any varieties whatever, we shall have discovered the causes of the transformation of species. Now we find by far the greatest number of varieties, and the most marked ones, among our domesticated animals and plants, and unless we are to assume that each of these is descended from a special wild species, the reason why there has been such a wealth of variety-formation among them must lie in the conditions which influence the relevant species in the course of domestication; and it remains for us to analyse these conditions till we come upon the track of the operative factors. With this conviction, Darwin devoted himself to the study of domesticated animals and plants. The first essential was to prove that every variety had not a separate wild species as ancestor, but that the whole wealth of our domesticated breeds originated, in each case, from one, or at least from a few wild species. Of course I cannot here recapitulate the multitudinous facts which were marshalled by Darwin, especially in his later works, notably his _Animals and Plants under Domestication_, but this is not necessary to an understanding of his conclusions, and I shall therefore restrict myself to a few examples.