)F THE HUMAN RACE, 



21? 



i hasten to rescue, so far as I aai able, the first and most mteresting- ac- 

 count we possess of the creation of man, from the philosophical doubts 

 which have been thrown upon it, and to reconcile it with the natural history 

 of man in our own day. 



The Mosaic statement has met with two distinct classes of opponents, 

 ©ach of which has pretended to a different ground of objection. The 

 one has regarded this statement as altogether untrue, and never intended 

 to be believed ; as a mere allegory or fiction ; — a beautiful mythos often 

 indulged in by other oriental writers in the openings of their respective 

 histories : — as an enlivening frontispiece to a book of instruction. The 

 other class has been in some degree more guarded in its attack ; and has 

 rather complained that the statement is inexphcit than that it is untrue. 

 These last philosophers have found out that ia its common interpretation 

 it de^s not accord with the hving volume of nature ; and they hence con- 

 tend that the common interpretation is incorrect ; they perceive or think 

 they perceive a variety of chasms in the sacred text which it is necessary 

 to fill up before it can be made to harmonize with natural facts and ap- 

 pearances. 



At the head of the former class stand* the names of some of the first 

 natural historians and scholars of modern times, as Linrieus, Buffon, Hel- 

 vetius, Monboddo, and Darwin. And from whom do these philosophers, 

 thus departing from the whole letter and spirit of the Mosaic history, pre- 

 tend to derive the race of man ? The four former from the race of monkeys ; 

 and the last to complete the absurdity, from the race of oysters ; for Dr. 

 Darwin seriously conjectures that as aquatic animals appear to have been 

 produced before terrestrial, and every living substance to have originated 

 from a form or nucleus exquisitely simple and minute, and to have been 

 perpetually developing and expanding its powers, and progressively ad- 

 vancing towards perfection, man himself must have been of the aquatic 

 order on his first creation : at that time, indeed, imperceptible from his 

 exility, but in process of years, or rather of ages, acquiring a visible or 

 oyster-like form, with little gills, instead of lungs, and, like the oyster, 

 produced spontaneously, without distinction into sexes ; that, as reproduc- 

 tion is always favourable to improvement, the aquatic or oyster mannikin, 

 by being progressively accustomed to seek its food on the nascent shores 

 or edges of the primasval ocean, must have grown, after a revolution of 

 countless generations, first into an amphibious, and then into a terrestrial 

 animal ; and, in like manner, from being without sex, first also into an an- 

 drogynous form, and thence into distinct male and female.^" 



It is not necessary to notice this dream of a poetizing philosopher, which 

 had also been dreamt of long before his own day, any further than to re- 

 mark that it is in every respect inferior to the opinion of two of the most 

 celebrated schools of ancient Greece, the Epicurean and the Stoic ; who,- 

 , though they disagreed on almost every other point, concurred in their dogma 

 concerning the origin of man ; and believed him to have sprung, equally 

 with plants and animals of every kind, from the tender soil of the new- 

 formed earth, at that time infinitely more powerful and prolific ; produced 

 in myriads of little wombs that rose, like mole-hills over the surface of the 

 ground, and were afterwards transformed, for his nourishment, into my- 

 riads of glandular and milky bulbs, so as to form a marvellous substitute 

 for the human-breast. 



In the correct and elegant description of Lucretius : — 



* See Temple of Nature, Cant. L p. 26. 29., II. p. 64. IV. 158., and the additional note* 

 on Sp6ntaiieo«5 Vitality and Reproduction. 



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