64 ESSAY ON CLASSIFICATION 



changes are known to take place in the course of time among organ- 

 ized beings appear as the result of an intellectual power, and go 

 therefore to substantiate the view that all the differences observed 

 among finite beings are ordained by the action of the Supreme In- 

 tellect, and not determined by physical causes. This position is still 

 more strengthened when we consider that the differences which exist 

 between different races of domesticated animals and the varieties of 

 our cultivated plants, as well as among the races of men, are perma- 

 nent under the most diversified climatic influences; a fact which the 

 extensive migrations of the civilized nations daily proves more ex- 

 tensively, and which stands in direct contradiction to the supposition 

 that such or similar influences could have produced them. 



When considering the subject of domestication in particular, it 

 ought further to be remembered that every race of men has its own 

 peculiar kinds of domesticated animals and of cultivated plants 

 which exhibit much fewer varieties among them, in proportion as 

 those races of men have had little or no intercourse with other races, 

 than the domesticated animals of those nations which have been 

 formed by the mixture of several tribes. 



It is often stated that the ancient philosophers have solved satis- 

 factorily all the great questions interesting to man, and that modern 

 investigations, though they have grasped with new vigor and illumi- 

 nated with new light all the phenomena of the material world, 

 have added little or nothing in the field of intellectual progress. Is 

 this true? There is no question so deeply interesting to man as that 

 of his own origin and the origin of all things. And yet antiquity had 

 no knowledge concerning it; things were formerly believed either to 

 be from eternity or to have been created at one time. Modern science, 

 however, can show in the most satisfactory manner that all finite 

 beings have made their appearance successively and at long intervals, 

 and that each kind of organized beings has existed for a definite 

 period of time in past ages, and that those now living are of com- 

 paratively recent origin. At the same time, the order of their succes- 

 sion and their immutability during such cosmic periods show no 

 causal connection with physical agents and the known sphere of 

 action of these agents in nature, but argue in favor of repeated in- 

 terventions on the part of the Creator. It seems really surprising that 

 while such an intervention is admitted by all except the strict mate- 



