The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~440,000 words · 2,098 passages
Cite this work
- APACharles Darwin. (n.d.). The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/the-variation-of-animals-and-plants-under-domestication
- MLACharles Darwin. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/the-variation-of-animals-and-plants-under-domestication.
- ChicagoCharles Darwin. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/the-variation-of-animals-and-plants-under-domestication.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The book where Darwin unloads all the evidence he could only summarise in the Origin: breeds of pigeons, dogs, horses, wheat and garden plants, and what happens when the selector is a person.
Context and history
Published in 1868, it carries twenty years of notes. It contains 'pangenesis', Darwin's hypothesis of how characters are inherited: it is wrong, and he offered it as provisional. That is a reason to read it, not to skip it — nowhere is it clearer what he lacked, a theory of heredity, or how far he got without one.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
every other characteristic that Darwin attributed its exemplary plasticity to its derivation from several different species of wild canines. Domestic cats, on the other hand, differed relatively little from one another, at least, their variation tended to be individual, rather than consolidated into breeds. Darwin attributed this to the minimal influence exerted by cat owners over the mating behavior of their animals, so that, alone among fully domesticated animals, cats could not be said to have undergone a genuine process of artificial selection. Farmyard ungulates, however, had all proved more susceptible to human manipulation, whether through the gradual enhancement of inherent tendencies, such as the relatively early maturation that distinguished shorthorn cattle, or through the preservation of spontaneously arising monstrosities, such as the short, broad foreheads and protruding lower jaws of the niata cattle of South America, the bulldogs of the bovine world. Among animals, fancy pigeons, with their short generations, devoted breeders, and lack of any pragmatic constraints on their extravagant deformations, provided Darwin with his most abundant material. He allotted less space to his survey of domesticated plants, although, with the exception of trees, they tended to he much shorter lived and more variable even than pigeons. For example, as Darwin pointed out, a single long-cultivated species—_Brassica oleracea,_ the ordinary cabbage—had given rise to strains as distinctive as Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and kohl-rabi. Darwin crammed in so much information of this sort that, in order to confine _Variation_ to two volumes of manageable size, less crucial evidence was relegated to a smaller typeface. And so compendious was his survey of domesticates that he felt constrained to deny that it was intended to he an exhaustive catalog.…