80 Psychological Distinctions 



insufficiency of nutriment, but likewise towards preserving 

 the typical character of their prey in a more direct manner, 

 by removing all that deviate from their normal or healthy 

 condition, or which occur away from their proper and suitable 

 locality, rather than those engaged in performing the office 

 for which Providence designed them. In illustration, it will be 

 sufficient to call attention to the principle on which many birds 

 of prey are enabled to discern their quarry. When the tyrant of 

 the air appears on wing, his dreaded form is instantly recog- 

 nised by all whose ranks are thinned for his subsistence ; and 

 instinct prompts them to crouch motionless, like a portion of 

 the surface, the tint of which all animals that inhabit open 

 places ever resemble ; so that he passes over, and fails to dis- 

 criminate them, and seeks perchance in vain for a meal in the 

 very midst of abundance ; but, should there happen to be an 

 individual incapacitated by debility or sickness to maintain 

 its wonted vigilance, or should its colours not accord suffi- 

 ciently with that of the surface, as in the case of a variety, 

 or of an animal pertaining to other and diverse haunts, that 

 creature becomes, in consequence, a marked victim, and is 

 sacrificed to appease the appetite of the destroyer : so pro- 

 foundly wise are even the minor workings of the grand system ; 

 and thus do we perceive one of an endless multiplicity of 

 causes which alike tend to limit the geographical range of 

 species, and to maintain their pristine characters without 

 blemish or decay to their remotest posterity. 



Thus it is that, however great may be the tendency of va- 

 rieties to perpetuate themselves by generation, we do not find 

 that they can maintain themselves in wild nature; nor do the 

 causes which induce variation, beyond the occasional and very 

 rare occurrence of an albino, prevail in those natural haunts 

 of species to which their structural adaptations bind them. 

 We have already noticed the anomalous influence of human 

 interference in altering the innate instincts of the lower ani- 

 mals, thereby unfitting them to pursue the mode of life fol- 

 lowed by their wild progenitors. It would be needless to 

 amplify on the concomitant effects produced by domestication 

 on the changes in the physical constitution and adaptations of 

 the corporeal frame of animals, which oftentimes render them 

 dependent on human assistance for continuous support, in the 

 degree of their domesticity. Such changes are equally im- 

 posed on the vegetable world by cultivation ; and they every 

 where mark the progress of man, and exhibit in indisputable 

 characters the diversity of his influence over the inferior ranks 

 of creation, from any mutual and reciprocal influence observable 

 among these latter. 



I may cursorily allude to hybridism also, as a phenomenon, 



