5490 Zoology : its present Phasis 



port of many painstaking naturalists of the United States of America: 

 it is now, we find, beginning to be admitted in France, after a sharp 

 struggle, no doubt, and the limits of fecundity in the hybrid breed are 

 being clearly defined experimentally. It is quite right that such ex- 

 periments should be made, although they do not lead to any important 

 practical results. To prove a hybrid race to possess continued fer- 

 tility there must be no return to either of the pure species to which the 

 hybrid owes its origin. The she-male, sterile with the he-male, is said 

 to become fertile by a union with the ass or horse ; that is, by a return 

 to one of the primitive races. Whilst agreeing with modern French 

 authors that more numerous experiments are required on this curious 

 and interesting subject, it may be laid down as a law that no hybrid 

 race is continuously fertile, and that it was not by this means that the 

 world became peopled with the innumerable species revealed to the 

 scientific by the living and fossil worlds. Other causes must, then, be 

 looked for, and there can only be two; 1st, the influence of the ex- 

 ternal media on living forms as they then existed ; 2nd, certain un- 

 known laws of life which bring into existence certain forms to the 

 detriment of and the extinction and exclusion of others. The 

 scientific will, we think, excuse us from seriously discussing a third 

 mode as probable or even possible ; the sweeping all living things 

 from off the earth, and the creation of new organic worlds. Even the 

 compilation ascribed to Moses did not go so far as this ; it preserved 

 a stock of pairs, human and brute, out of which the coming races, not 

 new, were to proceed. Cuvier's followers in England made great use 

 of certain expressions in Cuvier's works, expressions which he re- 

 peatedly and most formally denied. These ideas remain in vogue 

 even to the present day in model England, where a theory which 

 does not pay is very naturally scouted and laughed at. The theory 

 we allude to, first mooted by Socrates, advocated by Philo-Judaeus 

 and the Dutch author whom Paley pirated, worked practically in 

 England, produces to a certain class something like six millions per 

 annum : it must be a good theory, and of this no reasonable man 

 entertains a doubt. The date of the descent from Arrarat is no doubt 

 a puzzling question, but it is only so to those who cannot be made to 

 believe that the electric telegraph equals, if it does not exceed the 

 stupendous miracles of antiquity.* Illustrious theologians! we 

 wonder how any of you escape the fate of the unfortunate author of 

 'Geology reconciled with the Chronology of the Mosaic Deluge;' it 

 must be that you attach no special meaning to your words, and care 

 but little how Science wars against the horrors of ignorance, so long 

 as "the accidents" of your sacred offices are left untouched. 



The various species of animals which, since this orb commenced its 

 career in space, have decorated the earth, have not arisen from any 

 mixture of a few primitive species ; from the time they appear on the 

 earth, these species seem unalterable and unaltered until their extinc- 

 tion; but others appear distinct from the extinct, yet related to them: 



* Dr. Cumming's Sermons and Discourses, passim. 



