ON BREEDING. 203 



some memory; dull imagination; not a particle of sentiment; 

 slight sympathy; no lasting affection for their offspring after 

 they can provide for themselves; and no power of mind to rise 

 above the order of their natures. Their permanent affections, 

 if they can be said to have affections at all, are towards man 

 alone. They have instinct and passion much stronger than man ; 

 and that instinct and passion are uncontrollable even by dis- 

 cipline, unless under superior force and they indulge them on 

 every available occasion, regardless of consequences. Thus man 

 and the brute have little in common beyond their animal pro- 

 pensities. 



We have spoken of mankind in a state of civilization. But 

 even man can become brutalized ; and the lower in the scale of 

 humanity he descends, the more like the brute, in the indulgence 

 of his instincts and passion, he becomes, until, perhaps, the brute 

 is the better of the two. 



Medical men tell us, and observing people know, that concep- 

 tion and gestation in mankind, are more or less influenced by the 

 sensations or action of the mind, as sympathy, or imagination, 

 fright or terror in the female during their continuance, as seen 

 by strange marks on their bodies r or strange freaks of character 

 in their offspring in numerous instances. It is seldom seen in the 

 brute creation, and then only by sudden and startling emotion, 

 or long familiarity with particular associations. Man, unless he 

 becomes thoroughly brutalized, revolts at known incest. The 

 brute, in either sex, gratifies its lust with the first object of its 

 kind it meets, no matter what the blood relation, and in this 

 indulgence, only acts out its nature. In domestication, they are 

 but machines in our hands, with which to work out certain desired 

 results, and their relations in blood have nothing to do with pro- 

 priety or impropriety, in the coupling them together in any 

 conceivable blood relationship. 



