258 [Senate 



spotted among the flocks of his master, stripped rods of green wood 

 of a portion of their bark, and erecting them in watering troughs, 

 secured a greatly increased proportion of ring-streaked, speckled and 

 spotted progeny. He kept the spotted by themselves, and turned 

 all the brown among the flocks of Laban, that he might increase the 

 more rapidly the variety of the flocks that was to fall to him. More- 

 over, he erected the striped poles only when the stronger cattle came 

 to drink — withdrawing them on the approach of the feebler, so that 

 Jacob gained all the stronger calves. It is also illustrated in the spots 

 of blackness with which lambs of white flocks become impressed, if 

 fed in fields where there are black objects, as charred logs and stumps. 

 A more forcible illustration than perhaps any one beside, occurs in the 

 varieties of the human family, which are beyond all question acciden- 

 tal subdivisions of the same species. There are black, bronze and 

 copper complexions, as well as the fair and ruddy Caucasian. There 

 are albinos and mottled skins — monsters, to be sure, but capable to a 

 certain extent of propagation from sire to son. There are contours 

 of figure and of features, distinguishing the Chinese^ African^ Esqui- 

 maux and Indian from the Caucasian — and even distinguishing the 

 German, French, English and Spanish nations from each other. And 

 there are men whose whole physical constitutions are in the highest 

 degree contrasted with each other. There is in Smyrna and Con- 

 stantinople, a race of porters — a tribe of Cossacks ? trained to this vo- 

 cation — whose strength of muscle and firmness of bone enable them 

 to perform feats which would hardly be credited without the testimo- 

 ny of an eye-witness. Rev. Mr. Pierpont, of Boston, states that he 

 saw them engaged in carrying boxes whose weights were frequently 

 from six hundred to a thousand pounds. On the occasion of a fire, 

 one seized an iron safe, and ran with it and its contents on his back, 

 from the burning building. Another took upon his back the weight 

 of sixteen bushels of wheat — equal to eight bags of two bushels each 

 • — a quantity we should fear to place on the back of an ordinary horse 

 — and yet carried it without injury. Now, if we place such men as 

 these porters beside the feeble and delicate students of the Halls of 

 Oxford and Cambridge, there surely is a^ contrast as extreme as be- 

 tween the dray horse and the trotter of a race course — or as that be- 

 tween the wild SM'ine of Illinois and the Berkshire pigs. If such 

 chasms as these exist in the capacities of diff"erent individuals of the 

 same species, can it be difficult to believe that the varieties of dogSy 

 horses, cattle and sheep have been the off"spring of circumstance, 

 though the progress of change may not have been observed by any 

 single generation:/? The ability of man to improve stock by judicious 

 management, will be abundantly apparent if he remembers two points 

 in physiology : 



1st. That every circumstance in modes of life, climate, food, &c., 

 produces its specific eff"ect more or less marked, upon the physical 

 constitution of the animal. 



2d. That the physical constitution of the dam and sire is transmit- 

 ted to the progeny. 



