BAUBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 35 O 



to drink out of. The smell of the water is not at all nice. 

 I sometimes drink it Give my dearest love to Narsion 

 Skishadre, and tell her that I will write to her. Dearest 

 papa," <kc. 



It was a simple thought, which it required no reach of mind 

 whatever to grasp, and yet an hour spent with little Buchubai 

 made it tell upon me more powerfully than ever before, that 

 there is in reality but one human nature on the face of the 

 earth. Had I simply read of Buchubai Hormazdji corre- 

 sponding with her father Hormazdji Pestonji, and sending her 

 dear love to her old companion Narsion Skishadre, the names, 

 so specifically different from those which we ourselves employ 

 in designating our country folk, would probably have led me, 

 through a false association, to regard the parties to which they 

 attach as scarcely less specifically different from our country 

 folk themselves. I suspect we are misled by associations of 

 this kind when we descant on the peculiarities of race as in- 

 terposing insurmountable barriers to the progress of improve- 

 ment, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the diversi- 

 ties of form, colour, and language, the specific identity of the 

 human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those 

 powers of sustained application which so remarkably distin- 

 guish the Saxon ; and so we agree on the expediency of get- 

 ting rid of our poor Highlanders by expatriation as soon as 

 possible, and of converting their country into sheep-walks and 

 hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have philosophy 

 enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a 

 wise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that the 

 peculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mere 

 induced habits and idiosyncrasies engrafted on the stock of a 

 common nature by accidents of circumstance or development ; 

 and that, as they have been wrought into the original tissue 

 through the protracted operation of one set of causes, the 

 operation of another and different set, wisely and perseve- 



