but among all
thinking people. How far are they permanent, and how far mutable? With
reference to the permanence of Species, there is much to be learned from
the geological phenomena that belong to our own period, and that bear
witness to the invariability of types during hundreds of thousands of
years at least. I hope to present a part of this evidence in a future
article upon Coral Reefs, but in the mean time I cannot leave this
subject without touching upon a point of which great use has been made
in recent discussions. I refer to the variability of Species as shown in
domestication.

The domesticated animals with their numerous breeds are constantly
adduced as evidence of the changes which animals may undergo, and as
furnishing hints respecting the way in which the diversity now observed
among animals has already been produced. It is my conviction that such
inferences are in no way sustained by the facts of the case, and that,
however striking the differences may be between the breeds of our
domesticated animals, as compared with the wild Species of the same
Genus, they are of a peculiar character entirely distinct from those
that prevail among the latter, and are altogether incident to the
circumstances under which they occur. By this I do not mean the natural
action of physical conditions, but the more or less intelligent
direction of the circumstances under which they live. The inference
drawn from the varieties introduced among animals in a state of
domestication, with reference to the origin of Species, is usually this:
that what the farmer does on a small scale Nature may do on a large one.
It is true that man has been able to produce certain changes in the
animals under his care, and that these changes have resulted in a
variety of breeds. But in doing this, he has, in my estimation, in no
way altered the character of the Species, but has only developed its
pliability to the will of man, that is, to a power similar in its
nature and mode of action to that power to which animals owe their very
existence. The influence of man upon Animals is, in other words, the
action of mind upon them; and yet the ordinary mode of arguing upon
this subject is, that, because the intelligence of man has been able to
produce certain varieties in domesticated animals, therefore physical
causes have produced all the diversities among wild ones. Surely, the
sounder logic would be to infer, that, because our finite intelligence
can