374 TRANSMUTATION OF SPECIES. \March, 



sativum may say, Whence or how came they? It may be replied, 

 modo Scotico — Scotchman-like : "Whence or how came we and 

 other animals ? • Were we and other living sentient beings created 

 in a wild state, or were we not formed originally quite as good if 

 not better than we are now ? Again, is it not rather unphiloso- 

 phical as well as ww-theological, to maintain that the Creator 

 formed creatures and did not at the same period create food 

 for them ? We know He created food both for man and for beast 

 before He created the creatures destined to subsist on the pro- 

 ducts of an earlier creation. How was man to live, if it took 

 three generations to render a cabbage eatable, or twelve years to 

 convert jEgilops, a worthless grass, into the staff of life ? But 

 the wisdom of God provided for all this in creating cabbages 

 and bread-corn before He created men to eat them. That all 

 these good things degenerate if not carefully kept up to the mark 

 by the untiring industry and perseverance of man, I admit. Man 

 himself degenerates both physically and intellectually under ad- 

 verse circumstances. My object in thus filling up so much of 

 the pages of the ' Phytologist ^ is not to maintain paradoxes, 

 much less to gainsay what, is received as truth by the major 

 part of mankind, both learned and ignorant, while there is not 

 a particle of truth in it. Truth is not what may be true, but 

 what is true ; and which is not said because some one has said 

 it before, but because he who says it knows that it is true, 

 either from his own experience or the recorded and authenti- 

 cated experience of others. Even should the experimenter suc- 

 ceed in converting oats into rye, and jEffilops into wheat, he 

 would be nearly as far from offering sufficient evidence as ever, 

 viz. that oats and rye and wheat and yEffilops are mutable, and 

 that it is pure accident, when oats are sown, whether rye or oats 

 will be produced. Will anybody in his senses believe that, 

 granting the possibility of converting jEgilops ovata into jEffilops 

 triticoides, still there is nothing but an accidental difference be- 

 tween wheat and this wretched substitute for it ? How the human 

 race was to be supported during the many years admitted to be 

 necessary for this conversion may be left to the ingenuity of the 

 believers in these wild theories to explain. 



Verax. 



