Page - 258 - in The Origin of Species

258 ORIGIN OF SPECIES capacity for change will be admitted by all evolutionists ; but there is no need, as it seems to me, to invoke any internal force beyond the tendency to ordinary variability, which through the aid of selection by man has given rise to many well-adapted domestic races, and which through the aid of natural selection would equally well give rise by graduated steps to natural races or species. The final result will gen- erally have been, as already explained, an advance, but in some few cases a retrogression, in organisation. Mr. Mivart is further inclined to believe, and some nat- uralists agree with him, that new species manifest themselves "with suddenness and by modifications appearing at once." For instance, he supposes that the differences between the extinct three-toed Hipparion and the horse arose suddenly. He thinks it difficult to believe that the wing of a bird "was developed in any other way than by a comparatively sudden modification of a marked and important kind;" and appa- rently he would extend the same view to the wings of bats and pterodactyles. This conclusion, which implies great breaks or discontinuity in the series, appears to me improb- able in the highest degree. Every one who believes in slow and gradual evolution, will of course admit that specific changes may have been as abrupt and as great as any single variation which we meet with under nature, or even under domestication. But as species aremore variablewhen domesticated or cultivated than under their natural conditions, it is not probable that such great and abrupt variations have often occurred under nature, as are known occasionally to arise under domestica- tion. Of these latter variations several may be attributed to reversion; and the characters which thus reappear were, it is probable, in many cases at first gained in a gradual man- ner. A still greater number must be called monstrosities, such as six-fingered men, porcupine men, Ancon sheep, Niata cattle, &c. ; and as they are widely different in character from natural species, they throw very little light on our subject. Excluding such cases of abrupt variations, the few which re- main would at best constitute, if found in a state of nature, doubtful species, closely related to their parental types. My reasons for doubting whether natural species have