Mr.
Darwin makes great capital out of pigeons, enumerating all the varieties owned by fanciers, and showing how the Indian emperors bred them a thousand years before Christ.

But it is strange that he does not see that this makes against his theory; since in all that time this most variable of birds has never been transmuted into any other species.

The pigeon has never been changed into a crow, or a magpie, or a woodpecker, or a chicken; has never, in fact, become anything else than a pigeon.
Dogs are also somewhat variable in their varieties, and Mr.Darwin relies greatly upon supposed variations from some one assumed ancestral pair of dogs, into the greyhound, mastiff, terrier, and lapdog.

But granting all these unproven variations, no instance is alleged of a dog ever becoming a cat or a lion by any care or culture.
It will not do to allege, that, for anything we know to the contrary, our present breeds of domestic animals and plants may be so different from those called by the same names in ancient times as to be really different species.
We do know many things to the contrary.

In the tombs of the Egyptians, and the sculptures of the Assyrians, we have pictures of the various plants, birds, and animals, from three to four thousand years old, as well as of man, the most domestic animal of the whole.