ON HYBRIDIZATION AMONGST VEGETABLES. 



5 



a tribe? To me it seems- that the Bible itself appears rather to 

 indicate that it does not mean one of the lower subdivisions, 

 where it adds, as an explanation, " cattle, and creeping- thing-, 

 and beast of the earth, after its kind :" which might signify, that 

 cattle shall not yield a creeping- ; a beast of the earth (that is, 

 a cat or tiger, &c.) shall not yield cattle — i. e. a cow or sheep, 

 &c. ; a snake shall not yield a bird or a fish : and beyond such a 

 general outline the Bible history speaks not to man on the sub- 

 ject of the propagation and diversification of races. It is a 

 subject open to inquiry. It is not said that God made each 

 beast, but " the beast of the earth after his kind." We are left 

 to our own inferences and experiments, and to the examination 

 of the organic remains God has bequeathed to us, in order to 

 acquire temporal knowledge on such points ; which, as we 

 acquire it, will lead us more and more to adore the infinite 

 wisdom and power of God ; but is entirely unnecessary to the 

 great object of holy life and the acquisition of eternal salvation, 

 and therefore of a nature which the All wise did not think fit to 

 communicate to us authoritatively. Upon all such matters, 

 therefore, we have liberty to speculate and reason, with piety 

 and humility, according to the gifts God has given us, for the 

 good of mankind, and for His own glory. 



I will therefore state, briefly and humbly, what is the general 

 bias of my surmises as to the diversification of vegetables, to 

 which that of animals must be in a certain degree analogous. 

 We know that four races of men have branched out from one 

 stock, — the white, the black or African, the brown or Asiatic, 

 and the red, with various subdivisions of aspect amongst them, 

 and we know nothing of the mode or time in which those di- 

 versities arose. Revelation and history are equally silent on those 

 facts. They must have occurred very early. Jupiter is said to 

 have visited the Ethiopians ; and M. Faber has proved that the 

 things recorded of Jupiter relate to the period which immediately 

 followed the deluge. We may therefore assume that such changes 

 began in the lifetime of the sons of Noah, or were immediately 

 consequent on the dispersion of mankind. We are equally in 

 the dark as to the races of dogs. Old writers allude to different 

 kinds of dogs, and we do not know when or how any one of those 

 we possess originated ; and the same may be said with respect to 

 the origin of languages. From these facts I draw this inference, 

 which seems to me incontrovertible, that a course of change was 

 in operation in the early ages after the deluge, which had ceased, 

 or at least was greatly diminished, before the era at which our 

 knowledge of events began to be more precise, and handed down 

 by writing. I shall be told that these different races of men 

 breed freely together, and that these dogs intermix, and produce 



