Ruby on Rails

inside Rails source, at
http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activerecord/lib/active_record/relation/query_methods.rb
I found a lot of calls to:

relation = clone

I can understand where id the "relation" call, but... how about "clone"
?
Perhaps "clone" comes from Ruby1.9-Kernel, but I am not sure.
And github color it in blue, like a class...weird...

def where(opts, *rest)
relation = clone

if opts.present? && value = build_where(opts, rest)
relation.where_values += Array.wrap(value)
end

relation
end

Can somebody explain this "clone" ? Where it come from ?
Thanks
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