Origin of the Puddle Duck

It is a little-known fact that while Charles Darwin was already an old man [he would die in 1882] he was contemporanious of Beatrix Potter.

Being only a girl of 12, and raised in a "proper" Victorian (Right-Wing Christian on steroids) home, it would be years before Beatrix pish-toshed the whole nonsense of Adam's Rib, The Flood, and the phonograph record being full of evil spirits.

Beatrix also, unbenounced to others, collaborated with the elder Darwin, Re-illustrating Origin of the Species hoping one day, freethinking kids would delight with whimsy in her tales, much as they "once" had with Baby Jesus and His Christmas with the barn animals.




My impression is, that the effect is extremely small in the case of animals, but perhaps rather more in that of plants. We may, at least, safely conclude that such influences cannot have produced the many striking and complex co-adaptations of structure between one organic being and another, which we see everywhere throughout nature.

We have as yet spoken only incidentally of the disappearance of species and of groups of species. On the theory of natural selection the extinction of old forms and the production of new and improved forms are intimately connected together.