oloured, and how the petals of many flowers shall be streaked
or fringed, and has given prizes for complete success;--by selection, he
has made the leaves of one variety and the flower-buds of another
variety of the cabbage good to eat, at different seasons of the year;
and thus has he acted on endless varieties. I do not wish to affirm that
the long-and short-wooled sheep, or that the pointer and retriever, or
that the cabbage and cauliflower have certainly descended from one and
the same aboriginal wild stock; if they have not so descended, though it
lessens what man has effected, a large result must be left unquestioned.

{199} See the Essay of 1842, p. 3.

In saying as I have done that man makes a breed, let it not be
confounded with saying that man makes the individuals, which are given
by nature with certain desirable qualities; man only adds together and
makes a permanent gift of nature's bounties. In several cases, indeed,
for instance in the "Ancon" sheep, valuable from not getting over
fences, and in the turnspit dog, man has probably only prevented
crossing; but in many cases we positively know that he has gone on
selecting, and taking advantage of successive small variations.

Selection{200} has been _methodically_ followed, as I have said, for
barely a century; but it cannot be doubted that occasionally it has been
practised from the remotest ages, in those animals completely under the
dominion of man. In the earliest chapters of the Bible there are rules
given for influencing the colours of breeds, and black and white sheep
are spoken of as separated. In the time of Pliny the barbarians of
Europe and Asia endeavoured by cross-breeding with a wild stock to
improve the races of their dogs and horses. The savages of Guyana now do
so with their dogs: such care shows at least that the characters of
individual animals were attended to. In the rudest times of English
history, there were laws to prevent the exportation of fine animals of
established breeds, and in the case of horses, in Henry VIII's time,
laws for the destruction of all horses under a certain size. In one of
the oldest numbers of the _Phil. Transactions_, there are rules for
selecting and improving the breeds of sheep. Sir H. Bunbury, in 1660,
has given rules for selecting the finest seedling plants, with as much
precision as the best recent horticulturalist could. Even in the most
savage and rude nations, in the wars and famines which so fr