relations of wild as well as domestic quadrupeds, fish, birds, reptile,
insect, and common plants, and even of still humbler tribes of animal
and vegetable life, but he has effected in the forms, habits, nutriment
and products of the organisms which minister to his wants and his
pleasures, changes which, more than any other manifestaion of human
energy, resemble the exercise of a creative power. Even wild animals
have been compelled by him, through the destruction of plants and
insects which furnished their proper aliment, to resort to food
belonging to a different kingdom of nature. Thus a New Zealand bird,
originally granivorous and insectivorous, has become carnivorous, from
the want of its natural supplies, and now tears the fleeces from the
backs of the sheep, in order to feed on their living flesh. All these
changes have exercised more or less direct or indirect action on the
inorganic surface of the globe; and the history of the geographical
revolutions thus produced would furnish ample material for a volume.

The modification of organic species by domestication is a branch of
philosophic inquiry which we may almost say has been created by Darwin;
but the geographical results of these modifications do not appear to
have yet been made a subject of scientific investigation.

I do not know that the following passage from Pliny has ever been cited
in connection with the Darwinian theories but it is worth a reference:

"But behold a very strange and new fashion of them [cucumbers] in
Campane, for there you shall have abundance of them come up in forme of
a Quince. And as I heare say, one of the channced so to grow first at a
very venture; but afterwards from the seed of it came a whole race and
progenie of the like, which therefore they call Melonopopones, as a man
would say, the Quince-pompions or cucumbers"--Pliny, Nat. Hist.,