DEPOSITS OF SCOTLAND. 401 
the last age with a class of skeptics who,— their skepticism assum- 
ing, as is not very uncommon, the form of credulous belief, — 
used to argue that there had been an infinite series of men upon 
earth; and, of course, if the race had no beginning, could it be 
held in consistency that it was to have an end? We now 
absolutely know, as geologists, not only that a beginning there 
was, but that the beginning was a comparatively recent event; 
and further, founding on the unvarying experience of the past, 
we also know that the race, in at least its existing character and 
condition, is to have an end. ‘There are peculiarities, too, in 
the visitations of the present time, suited to suggest many a 
pregnant thought in connection with this curious and surely 
not unimportant subject. I travelled by railway, in middle 
autumn, two years ago, for about a hundred miles, through a 
series of well-cultivated fields ; and found almost all their pota- 
toes, constituting about one-fifth of the entire produce of the 
district, killed by a mysterious disease, and exhaling a heavy 
odor of death and decay, that infected the air mile after mile. 
There were perhaps as many individual plants of this useful 
vegetable lying brown and dead in the extensive area through 
which I passed as the entire species would have consisted of 
had it not been so sedulously and extensively cultivated by man; 
and the appearance of the blackened and fetid fields suggested 
to me how, in at least some of the instances, species may have 
died. A disease similarly extensive is devastating at the pres- 
ent time the vineyards of the south; and it is said that, should 
it continue its ravages for a year or two longer, the generous 
Madeira of the wine-drinker will become as much a mere tra- 
dition in consequence as the extinct wines of the ancients. Nay, 
during the present age have we not seen a new and terrible 
disease, quite as mysterious in its character and origin as any 
of those which have fallen on the vegetable kingdom, sweeping 
away greatly more than a hundred millions of our own species? 
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