rd 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.) Mav, 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 “ 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 infiuences, 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- 
