232 AMERICAN CATTLE. 



of an offshoot. Its birth would be a wrenching out of a part of 

 her internal system, instead of relieving her of an increasing 

 burthen which is in itself complete, and wholly separated from 

 her own being, so far as the ordinary functions of life and cir- 

 culation are concerned. 



Our author, Dr. Harvey, has also mentioned several instances 

 in the human family, where children of a second husband have 

 strongly resembled the children of his wife by a previous hus- 

 band, or some male friend with whom she had only been on 

 terms of social intimacy. That may be, but we ascribe it wholly 

 to imagination, or sympathy of the mother with the memory of 

 the first one. He also speaks of white mothers, who, having 

 their first child by a man of another race, as a Negro, Moor, or 

 Mongolian, and afterwards bearing children to men of their own 

 1 race, the children resembled more or less the fathers of their first 

 born. That may be so, owing to the same influences as in the 

 other cases; but they are too few and isolated to make a rule. 

 We, ourself, have known cases where white women had their 

 first child by a negro, and were afterwards married to white men, 

 but their children were as purely white as any others. 



We consider the theory as entirely fanciful, so far as humanity 

 is concerned, where the imagination has vastly more play than 

 in the brute creation; and in the latter, so extreme and wide 

 apart in its examples from the ordinary product of their species, 

 as to be classed among the occasional monstrosities which occur 

 in the conception and breeding of all animated beings. L. F. A.] 



Again Doctor Harvey: 



"But it so happens that a phenomenon precisely similar to 

 the one before us so like it, at least as not to be distinguishable 

 from it is sometimes seen under very different circumstances. 

 An animal (for example,) is sometimes observed to present the 

 same sort of resemblance to another animal, with which its mother 

 has never, at any time, had sexual connection, a circumstance 



