greater
effect upon captive animals than upon wild ones. Food prepared by man,
and often ill chosen, combined with the inclemency of an uncongenial
climate--these eventuate in modifications sufficiently profound to
become constant and hereditary in successive generations. I do not
pretend to say that this general cause of modification is so powerful as
to change radically the nature of beings which have had their impress
stamped upon them in that surest of moulds--heredity; but it
nevertheless changes them in not a few respects; it masks and transforms
their outward appearance; it suppresses some of their parts, and gives
them new ones; it paints them with various colours, and _by its action
on bodily habits influences also their natures, instincts, and most
inward qualities_" (and what is this but "radically changing their
nature"?). "The modification of but a single part, moreover, in a whole
as perfect as an animal body, will necessitate a correlative
modification in every other part, and it is from this cause that our
domestic animals differ almost as much in nature and instinct, as in
form, from those from which they originally sprung."[105]

Buffon confirms this last assertion by quoting the sheep as an
example--an animal which can now no longer exist in a wild state. Then
returning to cattle, he repeats that many varieties have been formed by
the effects--"diverse in themselves, and diverse in their
combinations--of climate, food, and treatment, whether under
domestication or in their wild state." These are the main causes of
variation ("causes generales de variete"),[106] among our domesticated
animals, but by far the greatest is changed climate in consequence of
their accompanying man in his migrations. The effects of the foregoing
causes of modification, especially the last of them, are repeatedly
insisted on in the course of the forty pages which complete the
preliminary account of the buffalo.

What holds good for the buffalo does so also for the mouflon or wild
sheep. This, Buffon declares to be the source of all our domesticated
breeds: of these there are in all some four or five, "all of them being
but degenerations from a single stock, produced by man's agency, and
propagated for his convenience."[107] At the same time that man has
protected them he has hunted out the original race which was "less
useful to him,"[108] so that it is now to be found only in a few
secluded spots, such as the mountains of