My Dear Fellow, My Dear Sentimental Friend, Do You Eat
Roast Beef Or Roast Mutton?
C. Drop that chaff and go back to the matter in hand.
F. To continue then with the cats. Famine comes and tests them, so
to speak; the weaker, the less active, the less cunning, and the less
enduring cats get killed off, and only the strongest and smartest
cats survive; there will be no favouritism shown to animals in a
state of Nature; they will be weighed in the balance, and the weight
of a hair will sometimes decide whether they shall be found wanting
or no. This being the case, the cats having been thus naturally
culled and the stronger having been preserved, there will be a
gradual tendency to improve manifested among the cats, even as among
our own mobs of sheep careful culling tends to improve the flock.
C. This, too, is obvious.
F. Extend this to all animals and plants, and the same thing will
hold good concerning them all. I shall now change the ground and
demand assent to another statement. You know that though the
offspring of all plants and animals is in the main like the parent,
yet that in almost every instance slight deviations occur, and that
sometimes there is even considerable divergence from the parent type.
It must also be admitted that these slight variations are often, or
at least sometimes, capable of being perpetuated by inheritance.
Indeed, it is only in consequence of this fact that our sheep and
cattle have been capable of so much improvement.
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