]
[Footnote 13: Winwood Reade's _Martyrdom of Man,_ p. 520.]
[Footnote 14: _Nineteenth Century,_ February 1888, pp. 162, 163.]
[Footnote 15: The Kestrel, which usually feeds on mice, birds, and
frogs, sometimes stays its hunger with earthworms, as do some of the
American buzzards. The Honey-buzzard sometimes eats not only earthworms
and slugs, but even corn; and the Buteo borealis of North America, whose
usual food is small mammals and birds, sometimes eats crayfish.]
CHAPTER III
THE VARIABILITY OF SPECIES IN A STATE OF NATURE
Importance of variability--Popular ideas regarding
it--Variability of the lower animals--The variability of
insects--Variation among lizards--Variation among
birds--Diagrams of bird-variation--Number of varying
individuals--Variation in the mammalia--Variation in internal
organs--Variations in the skull--Variations in the habits of
Animals--The Variability of plants--Species which vary
little--Concluding remarks.
The foundation of the Darwinian theory is the variability of species,
and it is quite useless to attempt even to understand that theory, much
less to appreciate the completeness of the proof of it, unless we first
obtain a clear conception of the nature and extent of this variability.
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