LECTURE XIV. 405 



any doubt expressed upon tliis point. There is, howeverj 

 another theory equally founded upon experience. 



'' Neither of these opposite assumptions can, however, be 

 decided by experiment ; the correctness of either lies beyond 

 the province of systematic natural history ; the solution pertains 

 to another province, which cannot be opened by the sensual 

 keys of science. 



" The opposite assumption then is, that there are created 

 domestic animals. The condition of domestic animals may 

 possibly be a specific not an acquired quality, just as the life 

 of animals in the forest, or in the steppe, is a specific not an 

 acquired quality. Those who beheve that man is not a gradu- 

 ally developed animal, but a creature animated by the breath 

 of Grod, cannot find it strange that there are animals which, at 

 their creation, were not merely endowed with the capacity for 

 domestication, but were, for the use of man, at once created 

 domestic animals. 



" There is a theory which scouts the word *' creation,' which 

 knows of no creation, but only of a so-called development from 

 the primitive mud ; from this quarter we expect the reproach of 

 simplicity. Our view, by acknowledging that experimental 

 science has its limits, includes the assumption of a peculiar 

 quality for the racial difierences of mankind, according to 

 which neither the notion of species nor of variety is applicable 

 to man as applied to the organic creation in general. When, 

 therefore, we speak of human races and domestic races, these 

 notions of race may be founded upon a peculiar principle of dif- 

 ferentiation exclusively belonging to these created forms. The 

 relation of the domestic animals to man renders it intelligible 

 that such a distinguishing principle is applicable to both. If 

 in the notion of race, applicable to man and domestic animals, 

 we only attend to qualities furnished by observation, and to the 

 exclusion of all other qualities observed in species and varieties, 

 many difficulties will be solved in the contest concerning the 

 unity of mankind and the descent of domestic animals. There 

 is thus in what we term races no longer any question about the 

 production of hybrids between species, about the incapacity of 

 real hybrids to propagate themselves regularly ; there is no 



