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ESP Digital Book

The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Two Volumes, Second Edition, Revised

Charles Darwin

Table of Contents:

Covers, Both Volumes
Front Matter, Volume I
Introduction
Chapter I
Domestic Dogs and Cats
Chapter II
Horses and Asses
Chapter III
Pigs - Cattle - Sheep - Goats
Chapter IV
Domestic Rabbits
Chapter V
Domestic Pigeons
Chapter VI
Pigeons continued
Chapter VII
Fowls
Chapter VIII
Duck - Goose - Peacock - Turkey - Guinea Fowl - ...
Chapter IX
Cultivated Plants: Cereal and Culinary Plants
Chapter X
Plants continued - Fruits - Ornamental Trees - Flowers
Chapter XI
On Bud Variation, and on Certain Anomalous Modes of Reproduction and Variation
Chapter XII
Inheritance
Front Matter, Volume II
Chapter XIII
Inheritance continued - Reversion or Atavism
Chapter XIV
Inheritance continued - Fixedness of Character - Prepotency - Sexual Limitation - Correspondence of Age
Chapter XV
On Crossing
Chapter XVI
Causes which Interfere with the Free Crossing of Varieties - Influence of Domestication on Fertility
Chapter XVII
On the Good Effects of Crossing, and on the Evil Effects of Close Inbreeding
Chapter XVIII
On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Changed Conditions of Life: Sterility from Various Causes
Chapter XIX
Summary of the Last Four Chapters, with Remarks on Hybridism
Chapter XX
Selection by Man
Chapter XXI
Selection continued
Chapter XXII
Causes of Variability
Chapter XXIII
Direct and Definite Action of the External Conditions of Life
Chapter XXIV
Laws of Variation - Use and Disuse, etc.
Chapter XXV
Laws of Variation continued - Correlated Variability
Chapter XXVI
Laws of Variation continued - Summary
Chapter XXVII
Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis
Chapter XXVIII
Concluding Remarks
Index
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Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and, in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s, the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.

The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication was first published in January 1868. A large proportion of the book contains detailed information on the domestication of animals and plants but it also contains in Chapter XXVII a description of Darwin's theory of heredity which he called pangenesis. After the publication of his Origin of Species Darwin recognized that his evolutionary model trquired some mechanism of heredity that allowed for the sustained existence of heritable variation. In Variation he dopcumented the existence of heritable variation and then offered pangenesis as a possible hereditary mechanism.

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