The Baker Street Bazaar has just been exhibiting its familiar annual
spectacle. Straight-backed, small-headed, big-barrelled oxen, as dissimilar
from any wild species as can well be imagined, contended for attention and
praise with sheep of half-a-dozen different breeds and styes of bloated
preposterous pigs, no more like a wild boar or sow than a city alderman is
like an ourang-outang. The cattle show has been, and perhaps may again be,
succeeded by a poultry show, of whose crowing and clucking prodigies it can
only be certainly predicated that they will be very unlike the aboriginal
_Phasianus gallus._ If the seeker after animal anomalies is not
satisfied, a turn or two in Seven Dials will convince him that the breeds
of pigeons are quite as extraordinary and unlike one another and their
parent stock, while the Horticultural Society will provide him with any
number of corresponding vegetable aberrations from nature's types. He will
learn with no little surprise, too, in the course of his travels, that the
proprietors and producers of these animal and vegetable anomalies regard
them as distinct species, with a firm belief, the strength of which is
exactly proportioned to their ignorance of scientific biology, and which is
the more remarkable as they are all proud of their skill in originating
such "species."

On careful inquiry it is found that all these, and the many other
artificial breeds or races of animals and plants, have been produced by one
method. The breeder--and a skilful one must be a person of much sagacity
and natural or acquired perceptive faculty--notes some slight difference,
arising he knows not how, in some individuals of his stock. If he wish to
perpetuate the difference, to form a breed with the peculiarity in question
strongly marked, he selects such male and female individuals as exhibit the
desired character, and breeds from them. Their offspring are then carefully
examined, and those which exhibit the peculiarity the most distinctly are