9HMKJM - The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 25
is attainable from
proof of independent origination
the nature of the case, the overthrow of particular
schemes of derivation has not established the opposite
proposition. The futility of each hypothesis thus far
proposed to account for derivation may be made
apparent, or unanswerable objections may be urged
against it ; and each victory of the kind may render
derivation more improbable, and therefore specific
creation more probable, without settling the question
either way. New facts, or new arguments and a new
mode of viewing the question, may some day change
the whole aspect of the case. It is with the latter
that Mr. Darwin now reopens the discussion.
Having
conceived the idea that varieties are in-
cipient species, he is led to study variation in the field
where it shows itself most strikingly, and affords the
greatest facilities to investigation. Thoughtful natu-
ralists have had increasing grounds to suspect that
a reexamination of the question of species in zoology
and botany, commencing with those races which man
knows most about, viz., the domesticated and culti-
vated races, would be likely somewhat to modify the
received idea of the entire fixity of species. This
field, rich with various but unsystematized
stores of
knowledge accumulated by cultivators and breeders,
has been generally neglected by naturalists, because
these races are not in a state of nature ; whereas they
deserve particular attention on this very account, as
experiments, or the materials for experiments, ready
to our hand. In domestication we vary some of the
natural conditions of a species, and thus learn experi-
mentally what changes are within the reach of vary