Permanence and Evolution

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Cat. About the cat also there is little to be said. There are a multitude of small wild felines with which the tame cat will breed, and there are tame cats sometimes said to be very closely similar to them (in India it is said there are some indistinguishable from F. torquatd). In different countries...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Cat. About the cat also there is little to be said. There are a multitude of small wild felines with which the tame cat will breed, and there are tame cats sometimes said to be very closely similar to them (in India it is said there are some indistinguishable from F. torquatd). In different countries there are markedly different breeds of cats, but in the same country we find no well marked breeds, only a considerable amount of fluctuating variability; the explanation is that indiscriminate crossing cannot easily be prevented. Very true, if selection could have been applied we should have had many distinct breeds, i.e., if cats did not habitually cross, their offspring would resemble the parents. In Paraguay, according to Rengger (Saugethiere von Paraguay, p. 42, et seg.), the cat, which has been bred there for 300 years, presents a striking difference from the European cat, which mustmean from any Rengger happened to know. In New Zealand the feral cats assume a streaky grey colour like that of wild cats. This is one of the commonest colours in the tame cat. Where is the evidence that their colour was ever anything else ? The Horse. Very little need be said about this animal, of whose wild origin little is known. There are a great number of breeds and sub-breeds, which reproduce their like with remarkable persistency, even colour, as Darwin remarks, being transmitted with great accuracy; and we see that several races of wild horses exist in various parts of the world, which have been supposed to be feral, but may just as easily be truly wild. I see therefore no ground for saying with Darwin, that few will agree with Colonel Hamilton Smith (Naturalist's Library) in maintaining that the horse has proceeded from five different stocks. I do not see why there may no...