HYBRID I NTEB MIXTURES. 
339 
pects into the ark, than that all the calceolarias on the moun- 
tains of Chili, or all the mezembryanthemums on the wastes 
of Southern Africa, exhibited their present peculiarities in 
the days of the patriarch. It was perhaps part of the wise 
scheme of Providence, for the purpose of peopling the world 
with the immense diversity of forms that occupy it, to give 
each created race a disposition to branch into diversities, 
acquiring constitutional peculiarities, which should keep 
them more or less separated ; and the same phasnomenon is 
observable in the languages of man, which are infinitely 
numerous ; yet there is no reason to believe that many lan- 
guages were given to man on the confusion of tongues ; on 
the contrary, the cloven tongues that gave back the power 
of universal speech, imply that they were few; but from 
these have branched out innumerable languages, which can- 
not be reunited, and no person can show when or how any 
one of them arose, though wq may trace the mingling of one 
with another in the later years of the world. One thing 
seems pretty certain, amongst the mysteries in which this 
subject is enveloped, that the differences worked, whether 
in plants or animals, in a state of domesticity, do not effect 
so great a constitutional separation inducing an indisposition 
to reunite and produce a prolific offspring, as the changes 
which have been wrought by nature in the wilderness. 
I have said in the preliminary observations on Amarylli- 
dacea?, that a perfect analogy between animals and vegetables 
in their generations is not apparent; but I do not mean to 
assert, that, if this subject can ever be thoroughly bottomed, 
it may not be found to exist. A reformation of Zoology is 
in progress ; for example, in Ornithology, the Linnajan ge- 
nus Motacilla was after a time confined to the wagtails, a 
large group being detached as Silvise ; but later observers 
found that group to consist of sevei'al families, and have 
since correctly distinguished at least the robins, the red- 
starts, the nightingales, the hedge warblers, the fruit-eating 
warblers, the sedge warblers, the chats, the troglodyte 
wrens, and the greenish wrens, as separate genera with their 
respective diversities ; and within those generic limits I 
suspect, that the power of crossing ma)^ be confined, and their 
several species, however now immutably distinct, may have 
respectively branched out from one stock since the period 
of the deluge. I have lately had under my observation a 
dog, whose father was a fox in an innyard at Ripon, and it 
z 2 
