2 



ON HYBRIDIZATION AMONGST VEGETABLES. 



• Let us, however, consider the grounds for believing that all the 

 existing forms of vegetable and animal life flourished, such as they 

 now are, from the first. If such was the case, why do the deposits 

 of the old world not exhibit them all, as well and as plentifully 

 as the lost races? And how comes it that the primaeval forests, 

 and the vegetation of primaeval swamps, have vanished with the 

 mastodon and the sauri, and neither the oak nor the chesnut, 

 neither the rhododendron nor the azalea of our own days, are to 

 be found amongst the remains of ancient time ? We know of 

 no second creation of vegetables ; we have no account given to 

 us, by any person having divine authority, of any successive acts 

 of creation, except in the course and unfolding of the reproduc- 

 tive system by generation, and in the creation of land animals 

 after the fowls and aquatic creatures, and of man after them, 

 though every reproduction, where a new soul is incorporated 

 with a new body, is in fact a fresh creation, but conformable to 

 the law established by God at the commencement, when He 

 said, " Let the waters and let the earth bring forth ;" unless we 

 adopt this, which perhaps is the most probable solution, that the 

 mandate to the earth to bring forth vegetables (that is to say, 

 the law impressed upon its matter to that effect) had not merely 

 instantaneous effect, but was a law continuing for ever to operate, 

 and, as long as the earth remained in the same general state, 

 would reproduce the same results in the generations successively 

 arising ; but, on each great change in the circumstances of the 

 earth itself, would produce results, both in the vegetable and 

 animal forms, that are continually arising from and returning to 

 the dust, different from those which the same mandate or law of 

 the Almighty evoked in its original condition. That simple view 

 of the great creative act of Almighty God is calculated to give 

 us the sublimest view of His unfathomable wisdom and power, 

 and it accounts for the mystery of generative reproductions in 

 similar form, as well as for the variations which have taken place in 

 existing things since the first great periods of the creation. If the 

 old saurian races, which are utterly extinct amongst animals, could 

 only thrive in shallow salt water, which seems probable, we can 

 understand why, after the uplifting of a larger portion of the 

 earth and the confinement of the waters to deeper hollows within 

 a narrower space, their races should have gradually failed, being 

 drowned or starved in the deep, and unable to exist on the dry 

 land. We may, perhaps, by a stretch of imagination, figure to 

 ourselves some drier and more elevated spot in the earliest ages 

 of the world, where the animals and vegetables which were 

 destined to people it in later years, after the destruction of the 

 races which prevailed at first, had their nidus, and were so 

 closely quartered together, that the species of rhinoceros and 



