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The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication Author:Charles Darwin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for hybrids raised from five differently coloured liens differed greatly in plumage. I formerly examined some cnrions hybrids in the Zoological Gardens, between ... more »the Penguin variety of the common duck and the Egyptian goose (Anvir at'jyptlacux); and although I will not assert that the domesticated variety preponderated over the natural species, yet it had strongly impressed its unnatural upright figure on these hybrids. I am aware that such casas as the foregoing have been ascribed by various authors, not to one species, race, or individual being prepotent over the other in impressing its character on its crossed offspring, but to such rules as that the father influences the external characters and the mother the internal or vital organs. But the great diversity of the rules given by various authors almost proves their falseness. Dr. Prosper Lucas has fully discussed this point, and has shown1'that none of the rules (and I could add others to those quoted by him) apply to all animals. Similar rules have been announced for plants, and have been proved by Gartner19 to be all erroneous. If we confine our view to the domesticated races of a single species, or perhcips even to the species of the same genus, some such rules may hold good; for instance, it seems that in reciprocally crossing various breeds of fowls the male generally gives colour; but conspicuous exceptions have passed under my own eyes. It seems that the ram usually gives its peculiar horns and fleece to its crossed offspring, and the bull the presence or absence of horns. In the following chapter on Crossing 1 shall have occasion to show that certain characters are rarely or never blended by crossing, but are transmitted in an unmodified state from either parent- form ; I refer to this fact here because it is som...« less