There is one theory of the Origin of Species which I have never seen suggested. Probably this is because I have never read the numberless and voluminous works in which it has been suggested. For I have read much madder things, and nothing mad is likely to have been missed by the modern mind. But since it shocked the respectability of agnostics to suggest that all creatures had been made different by God, why did nobody suggest that they had been made different by Man? Why not trace the vast variety of animals as we can really trace the vast variety of dogs? The dog is already almost a world in himself, with all the appearance of distinct orders and types. A St. Bernard approaches the size and surpasses the legendary virtues of a lion; while there is a sort of Pekinese which a man might almost tread on as a somewhat unpleasing insect. Yet all this world of evolution has presumably had Man for its god. Suppose our sphere in space has itself been the Island of Dr. Moreau. Suppose Man had some prehistoric civilization so colossal and complete that all beasts were beasts of burden, or all animals were domestic animals; that all rabbits were pet rabbits or all fleas performing fleas. Suppose the tame bird came first, and what we know as the wild bird afterwards. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his early anti-domestic diatribes, compared a woman in the home to a parrot in the cage, saying that mere custom made us think the connexion natural. The answer, it has always seemed to me, is strangely obvious. It is surely plain that the housewife is not the bird in the cage, but the bird in the nest. But if, in that age of wild sceptics, anyone had wished to outdo Mr. Shaw in paradox, he could have done it brilliantly by this hypothesis that the colours of a parrot were actually produced in a cage; and that an exiled bird only built himself a rude den of sticks and mud as an outlaw does when driven from his home. Suppose, in short, that Man has not only been a dog-fancier, but a wolf-fancier and a hyena-fancier. Suppose he really fancied a rhinoceros. Suppose some prehistoric squire kept a stud of giraffes; or his money-lender got a peerage on the plea that he had improved the breed of crocodiles. Then we have only to suppose this universal Zoo broken up like the Roman Empire; and all we see is its neglect and riot. The tiger is a stray cat; a specially large and handsome cat who took the prize (and the prize-giver) and escaped to the jungle. A whale was some sort of hornless cow sent into the sea like a Newfoundland dog, who suddenly refused to come back again. This thesis accounts for the comparative rapidity of the differentiation, over which the geologists fight with the biologists. It accounts rationalistically for those evidences of a creative purpose which are so distressing to a refined mind. It accounts for the camel, who seems always to have been in captivity; and accounting for a camel is something. Above all, it accounts for that very vivid impression of something in various species at once outrageous and exact. Jefferies found in the farcical outlines of fish or bird the notion that they must have been produced without design. To me this sounds like saying that the caricatures of Max Beerbohm must have been produced without design. I could as easily believe, so far as this mere ?sthetic impression goes, that the face on a gargoyle was merely moulded by the pouring rain. Artistically, the sun-fish or the hornbill do not look in the least like accidents; but it might be maintained that they look like fashions. There are some tropical birds and fruits that really have the cut and colours of novelties in a shop window. We might fancy that an elephant was designed in the same taste as Babylonian architecture; or the leopard and the tiger to match the tapestries of the East. There is probably somewhere a bird as sinister and terrifying as a top-hat; and in some luxuriant jungle a plant as preposterous as a pair of trousers. The monsters may be only antiquated fashion-plates. For this is one of the numberless neglected fallacies in the clotted folly of Eugenics. Even if we could in the abstract breed humanity well, there would be a flutter of modes and crazes about what was considered well-bred. The dog is bred with design; but surely not always with discretion. The dachshund appears to have been pulled out on the rack of some demoniac vivisectionist; and somebody seems to have cut off the bull-dog’s nose, most emphatically to spite his face. On the analogy of the things we do breed, the Eugenist may be expected to produce a brood of hunchbacks or a pure race of Albinos. It is, I hope, unnecessary to remark that I do not believe in this theory; but there have been people who might well have believed in it. There were people who could believe in Swinburne’s sentiment, “Glory to Man in the ............