2 ON THE GEOGRAPHY OF ANIMALS. 



have produced this dissimilarity of creatures ? and, 

 secondly, is there method in all this amazing diversity ? 

 Each of these questions is highly interesting, and de- 

 mands a separate consideration. 



(2.) MAN, although naturally formed to inhabit but 

 one element, is yet enabled, by art, to traverse vast 

 oceans; and, by the peculiarity of his constitution, to 

 live in all climates which produce vegetation. In his 

 natural state, he is among the least qualified of living 

 beings for making rapid transitions from one part of 

 the earth to another, and yet he has peopled its entire 

 surface. A Cf fair-haired " native of Europe migrates 

 with his family, and settles among the woolly-haired 

 and swarthy inhabitants of Africa. Do his descendants, 

 in the lapse of a century, born under a scorching sun, 

 begin to assume any of the characteristics of the races 

 that surround them ? do their lips gradually become 

 thick, their nose flattened, and their complexion black ? 

 Assuredly not ; the supposition is refuted by actual ex- 

 perience to the contrary. Again, does an African diet, 

 or a change of costume, create any change in their form, 

 or their mental perceptions ? are their national charac- 

 teristics, in short, in any degree lost, so long as their race 

 is preserved pure ? Let the Spaniards, settled for more 

 than two centuries among the copper-coloured Indians of 

 Mexico and New Spain, the Dutch boors of Southern 

 Africa, the descendants of the whites who first settled 

 in the West Indies, above all, the Jews, now scat- 

 tered " among every nation under heaven:" let these, 

 we repeat, tacitly reply to these questions. Such living 

 testimonies, " known to all, should at once have dis- 

 pelled the illusion which many writers, and some of 

 them able ones, have indulged in ; that temperature, 

 food, clothing, and other secondary influences, were the 

 chief causes of that extraordinary variation in the aspect 

 of the human species which the different nations of the 

 earth exhibit, and which, so long as each race is pre- 

 served pure, is unchanging and unchangeable. Upon 

 such a subject the modest and ingenuous mind may in- 



