ON SPECIES, HYBRIDS, AND VARIETIES. 169 



zone, need not be insisted on. The question, then, arises, whether their 

 origin is to be attributed to that tendency to variation of form, which 

 obtains, more or less, throughout the animal kingdom, resulting from cir- 

 cumstances which elude our scrutiny, or, whether they are aboriginal, and, 

 in this sense, a distinct race ? Could we pierce the darkness of antiquity, 

 the obscure of by-gone time ; could we work out a history of our 

 species, commencing with Man's first existence on the globe, we might 

 solve a question on which many are divided, and to which each party 

 brings plausible arguments. As it is, we must, on many points, remain in 

 conjecture, or with only analogy to guide us. One thing is clear, that no v 

 external, or physical causes, with which physiologists are acquainted, can 

 change a nation of the Celtic, or the Teutonic race, into the Negro, the 

 Papuan, or Alfourou. Formed for the regions they inhabit, and not by 

 them, the true circumstances of their primordial rise are lost in the night of 

 unrecorded ages. 



But, supposing that the Negroes, or, that any well-defined races 

 of mankind, be aboriginal, it does not follow that their specific identity 

 with other races is, therefore, nullified. That they are of the same species 

 with the other families of mankind, according to the received ideas of 

 species, every circumstance tends to establish ; nor does this admission 

 interfere, in one way or another, with the question, either as to their 

 aboriginal creation, or as to their assumption, at some unknown period, 

 of their distinguishing characteristics. If, by the command of the Creator, 

 the earth became covered with grass and herbage ; if forests sprung up on 

 the hills ; then must millions of the same species of the vegetable king- 

 dom have, simultaneously, acquired existence ; there is, therefore, little to 

 startle us, in the admission that sucl^ may have been the case, also, with 

 respect to the animal kingdom. 



Animals are born, they attain maturity, they propagate their species, 

 they die. The dawn of an animal's existence is the first step toward 

 its death ; the law of death necessitates the law of reproduction. Every 

 species has a definite and natural duration of life ; a duration determined 

 by the laws of nature, but which cannot be known, except by expe- 

 rience. Hence it is, that a table of the natural duration of life, through- 

 out the whole of the animal kingdom, or even throughout the vertebrate 

 classes, involves a thousand insurmountable difficulties, in the way of its 

 execution. We cannot watch the days of the existence of animals in a state 

 of nature ; multitudes are absolutely beyond the sphere of our observation. 

 We cannot wander in the depths of the ocean, and study, in their na- 

 tive haunts, the countless thousands of living things which tenant the 

 briny waters ; and, therefore, we cannot estimate the natural duration of 

 their lives. But, setting all this aside, so many are the chances of life, 

 so few are the animals, within the range of our observation that die from 



