“If Natural Selection be true, then what we call a Pig is but a
fleeting vision; all the past he has been becoming a Pig, and all
the future he will spend evolving out of Pigdom, and Pig is but a
moment’s phase in the eternal flux.”
This overlooks the melancholy possibility of an extinction of Pigs, but
it may be accepted on the whole as true. And against this Mr. Belloc
gives us his word, for that upon examination is what his “Evidence”
amounts to--that Types are Fixed. He jerks in capitals here in a rather
convincing way. It is restrained of him, considering how great a part
typography plays in his rhetoric, that he has not put it up in block
capitals or had the paper perforated with the words: Fixed Types.
“We have the evidence of our senses that we are surrounded by fixed
types.”
For weeks and months it would seem Mr. Belloc has walked about Sussex
accumulating first-hand material for these disputations, and all this
time the Pigs have remained Pigs. When he prodded them they squealed.
They remained pedestrian in spite of his investigatory pursuit. Not one
did he find “scuttling away” with a fore-limb, “half-leg, half-wing.”
He has the evidence of his senses also, I may remind him, that the
world is flat. And yet when we take a longer view we find the world is
round, and Pigs are changing, and _Sus Scrofa_ is not the beast it was
two thousand years ago.
Mr. Belloc is conscious of historical training, and I would suggest
to him that it might be an improving exercise to study the Pig
throughout history and to compare the Pigs of the past with the Pigs
of a contemporary agricultural show. He might inform himself upon the
bulk, longevity, appetites, kindliness, and general disposition of
the Pig to-day. He might realise then that the Pig to-day, viewed not
as the conservative occupant of a Sussex sty, but as a species, was
something just a little different as a whole, but different, definably
different, from the Pig of two thousand or five thousand years ago. He
might retort that the Pig has been the victim of selective breeding
and is not therefore a good instance of Natural Selection, but it was
he who brought Pigs into this discussion. Dogs again have been greatly
moulded by man in a relatively short time, and, again, horses. Almost
all species of animals and plants that have come into contact with
man in the last few thousand years have been greatly modified by his
exertions, and we have no records of any detailed observations of
structure or habits of creatures outside man’s range of interest before
the last three or four centuries. Even man himself, though he changes
with relative slowness because of the slowness with which he comes to
sexual maturity, has changed very perceptibly in the last five thousand
years.