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Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1823-1913

"Darwinism (1889)"

Moreover, on comparing the
variations which occur in any one generation of domesticated animals
with those which we know to occur in wild animals, we find no evidence
of greater individual variation in the former than in the latter. The
results of man's selection are more striking to us because we have
always considered the varieties of each domestic animal to be
essentially identical, while those which we observe in a wild state are
held to be essentially diverse. The greyhound and the spaniel seem
wonderful, as varieties of one animal produced by man's selection; while
we think little of the diversities of the fox and the wolf, or the horse
and the zebra, because we have been accustomed to look upon them as
radically distinct animals, not as the results of nature's selection of
the varieties of a common ancestor.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: Darwin, _Animals and Plants under Domestication_, vol. i.
p. 322.]
[Footnote 32: These facts are taken from Darwin's _Domesticated Animals
and Cultivated Plants_, vol. i. pp. 359, 360, 392-401; vol.


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