The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

RECORD: Darwin, C. R. [1858]. Dogs, 1864; 1867 / Spanish fowls. CUL-DAR85.B34. Edited by John van Wyhe (Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/)

REVISION HISTORY: Transcribed by Christine Chua and edited by John van Wyhe 3.2022. RN3

NOTE: See record in the Darwin Online manuscript catalogue, enter its Identifier here. Reproduced with permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library and William Huxley Darwin. The volumes CUL-DAR80-86 contain material for Darwin's book Descent of man (1871).

Darwin cited this in Descent 2: 98. B34v is reproduced and discussed in Eveleen Richards, Darwin and the making of sexual selection. 2017, pp. 352-353. According to Richards, this is one of two 'lost' leaves from Darwin's 'big book'. As she writes in her prologue: "Two rediscovered pages of his "big species" book (thought lost) show that Darwin had put female choice in theoretical place by, at the latest, mid-1858." The other page being CUL-DAR85.25r.

[B34]

Dogs

1864 278♀: 265 ♂: : 100 :Y 95.32 (Females in excess)

[calculations]

1867 325 ♀: 378 ♂: : 100 : Y116.30 (males in excess)

[calculations]

[B34v]

[top of page excised]

of or in

wattle on our black Spanish Fowls are very ornamental in our eyes, I presume the hen has no choice, left her in selecting her partner, even if we could stretch our belief so far as to suppose a fine rosy comb was attractive to her eyes, like the brilliant colours & strange action of the Rock manakin seems to be to the hens of that bird. I suppose that we must attribute many of these characters, as the brush of hair of the cock turkeys breast, to those same laws of growth, which have produced the horn on the Crève-cœur fowl, or first commencement of the wattle in the carrier pigeon.

Citation: John van Wyhe, ed. 2002-. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. (http://darwin-online.org.uk/)