and Mr. Burgess. Mr. Youatt, one of the greatest authorities on breeding domestic animals, says: "There is not a suspicion existing in the mind of any one at all acquainted with the subject that the owner of either of them has deviated in any one instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell's original flock, and yet the difference between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so great that they have the appearance of being quite different varieties." In this case there was no desire to deviate from the original breed, and the difference must have arisen from some slight difference of taste or judgment in selecting, each year, the parents for the next year's stock, combined perhaps with some direct effect of the slight differences of climate and soil on the two farms.
Most of our domesticated animals and cultivated plants have come to us from the earliest seats of civilisation in Western Asia or Egypt, and have therefore been the subjects of human care and selection for some thousands of years, the result being that, in many cases, we do not know the wild stock from which they originally sprang. The horse, the camel, and the common bull and cow are nowhere found in a wild state, and they have all been domesticated from remote antiquity. The original of the domestic fowl is still wild in India and the Malay Islands, and it was domesticated in India and China before 1400 B.C. It was introduced into Europe about 600 B.C. Several distinct breeds were known to the Romans about the commencement of the Christian era, and they have since spread all over the civilised world and been subjected to a vast amount of conscious and unconscious selection, to many varieties of climate and to differences of food; the result being seen in the wonderful diversity of breeds which differ quite as remarkably as do the different races of pigeons already described.
In the vegetable kingdom, most of the cereals—wheat, barley, etc.—are unknown as truly wild plants; and the same is the case with many vegetables, for De Candolle states that out of 157 useful cultivated plants thirty-two are quite unknown in a wild state, and that forty more are of doubtful origin. It is not improbable that most of these do exist wild, but they have been so profoundly changed by thousands of years of cultivation as to be quite unrecognisable. The
