vegetables ; that such created types cannot properly amal- 
gamate; and that, if a monster is at any time produced be- 
tween them seminally, it cannot be seminally reproduced; 
that the species of botanists and the permanent local varieties 
are not essentially different in their nature, but are variations 
induced by causes more or less remote in the period of their 
operation, though thefeatures of their diversity may be severally 
more or less important, and that they differ from accidental 
varieties in the permanent habit of similar reproduction which 
they have acquired from soil and climate, and that often in a 
long succession of ages. Those points appear to me now 
completely established, excepting that we cannot prove that 
even the genera did not branch out from higher types, or in 
fact that the tribes or orders were not the original genera, 
or kinds. In some genera we find that all the species are 
capable of breeding together and producing a fertile offspring : 
in Hippeastrum that they even prefer breeding with each 
other; in some genera that many species will cross together, 
and some have as yet refused to cross; in some, that the 
cross-bred plants are abundantly fertile ; in some obstinately 
sterile; in some individuals capable of fertilization by the 
pollen of another, and not by its own ; in some cases that two 
n p will breed freely with a third, and not with each 
other. 
“To what results do these facts lead us? The promis- 
cuous blending of the species of any one genus proves that the 
sterility or impediment to intermixture does not depend upon 
any original created diversity of species—i.e., that the thing 
called a species by botanists is not the created type; and, if 
the fertility does not depend upon that, the various results 
must depend upon the want of equal affinity amongst the 
several species of each respective genus—that is to say, on a 
wider departure from the common type in the several varieties 
of one genus than in those of another. We cannot suppose 
any thing so preposterous as that the Almighty would have 
created so many species of a genus, with permission, when 
approached together by the hand of man, to confound their 
generations, and so many others under a peremptory prohibi- 
tion to do so. Therefore, if by a genus we mean anything 
definite, anything that has a real and natural character, and 
not merely a fanciful and capricious denomination, whatever 
