Darwin's long work, "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication" was published on this day in 1868. Published a little over eight years after "Origin of Species," the book provides Darwin's data about mechanisms of variation among domestic species and the role of environment in species development. Darwin offered his "provisional hypothesis" on what he called "pangenesis," a kind of particle mechanism for how species features are passed among generations. He didn't have the benefit of Mendel's researches on genetics, which only became widely known over thirty years later. So Darwin's provisional hypothesis wasn't as well received as his accumulation of data about variations.
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