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Show 273, WILD SHEEP AND TAME MEN The wild mountain sheep provided the best example for Muir's theory about wild animals in Nature. He pursued his study of these inaccessible and "noblest of animal mountaineers" in the Sierra and around Mount Shasta. But when he began to write about them, he entered a controversy which had been flowing west since 1860, when Asa Gray reviewed The Origin of Species for Atlantic. By 1868 the Darwinian issue had followed the railroad as far as Antelope Station, Nebraska, and became a major part of what one historian calls the rediscovery of the West by the scientists. O.C. Marsh had identified the fossil bones of Protohippus, a primitive horse. He published his findings in 18 74, and Darwin acknowledged that Marsh's paper "constituted the best support for evolution appearing in the two decades following The Origin of Species." Marsh reconstructed the genealogy of the horse from fossil bones, but Muir wanted to say a word for living evolution in Nature, by celebrating the living inhabitants of the wilderness. In this context, Muir's "Wild Sheep of California" was convincing evidence that he was no ignorant shepherd. He conducted a serious investigation into the evolution of sheep, and praised Nature's breeding techniques. One of his chief claims to authority echoes that of the Studies. He had lived in the alpine world of the mountain sheep and had observed |