these animals would doubtless have been more strong and active, and might, when hard pressed, have performed a much longer voyage. Hence islands remote from the continent may obtain inhabitants by casualties which, like the late storms in Morayshire, may only occur once in many centuries, or thousands of years, under all the same circumstances." The isles of the Pacific have no quadrupeds, but some of those just mentioned-hogs, dogs, and rats, with the exception of a few bats; and only rats are found in Easter Island, the most remotely seated in the Pacific.

There is another method of transport, which, though very rarely in action, may extensively diffuse both vegetable and animal tribes. In a former chapter of this work, the occurrence of floating islands in lakes has been noticed; and in addition to the instances there referred to, Mr. Darwin describes some on the Lake of Tagua-cagua, in Chili, which deserve attention. "They are composed of the stalks of various dead plants intertwined together, and on the surface of which other living ones take root. Their form is generally circular, and their thickness from four to six feet, of which the greater part is immersed in the water. As the wind blows they pass from one side of the lake to the other, and often carry cattle and horses as passengers." Towards the mouth of the great rivers, the Mississippi, Amazon, Orinoco, Congo, and Ganges, similar islands are formed, where any obstacle occurs to the further progress of the wood and vegetation drifted down by the currents from the interior countries, and sometimes these islands are driven from their moorings by a flood or a storm, and then float away, either entire or in piecemeal, into the open sea. They have been several times met with in the Indian Ocean, after the typhoon has raged, covered with mangrove-trees interwoven with underwood, and ships have sometimes been in peril, in consequence of mistaking them for firm ground. "It is highly interesting to trace, in imagination, the effects of the passage of these rafts from the mouth of a large river to some archipelago, such as those in the South Pacific, raised from the deep, in comparatively modern times, by the operations of the volcano and the earthquake, and the joint labours of coral animals and testacea. If a storm arise, and the frail vessel be wrecked, still many a bird and insect may succeed in gaining by flight some island of the newly formed group, while the seeds and berries of herbs and shrubs, which fall into the waves, may be thrown upon the strand. But if the surface of the deep be calm, and the rafts are carried along by a current, or wafted by some slight breath of air fanning the foliage of the green trees, it may arrive, after a passage of several weeks, at the bay of an island, into which its plants and animals may be poured out as from an ark, and thus a colony of several hundred new species may at once be naturalised." Extremely rare as is the occurrence of such a wandering Delos, it unquestionably belongs to the class of facts, romantic as it appears; nor do the effects attributed to it at all trespass beyond the sobrieties of calculation. If the West India islands had no samples of animal nor vegetable life common to the continent of North America, their reception of both might be presumed, whenever the great raft of the Atchafalaga (an arm of the Mississippi, ten miles long, and two hundred yards broad,) is broken up, as it is almost certain to be,-sending down a hundred islets to float in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The theory embraced with reference to animal distribution may appear to some readers at variance with the authority of Revelation, which, according to popular interpretation, teaches the collection of types of all living races into the Noachian ark, the occurrence of a universal deluge destroying the other members of each family, and the subsequent dispersion of the preserved stock from one common centre, the mountains of Ararat, to repopulate the world. With this theory of Linnæus and Pennant it is impossible to reconcile zoological facts, without supposing a series of the most astounding and useless miracles, concerning which a total silence is preserved in the Scripture narrative.

Q Q

We know that the kangaroos and emus of New Holland, the llamas of Peru, the sloths, armadilloes, and ant-eaters of Paraguay, to mention no other instances, never could have accomplished the passage from the places of their location to any central part of the Old World, and back again, from the scene where the ark of Noah was set afloat, by natural means. Neither can the polar bear and the hippopotamus, the ostrich and the eider fowl, the reindeer and the giraffe, to refer to no more examples, exist together in a state of nature, requiring a great diversity of climate; and supposing them aggregated by the Divine Power, and sustained in a common temperature, the difficulty of conceiving a building capable of accommodating a tenth of the single parent pairs of all the species, is prodigious. The difficulty increases when we consider the vast number of freshwater fish, and reptiles of the rivers, to be provided for. To supernatural agency, indeed, all things are possible; but when nothing is said of its action in the record-when the object, imagined to have been effected by it, must have been to a great extent useless-and when the congregation of the animals is represented as in the main the work of Noah, we may surmise that a transaction local in its nature, and comparatively limited in its extent, is the subject of the relation. This opinion, which zoological considerations favour, is not opposed to the narrative, expounded in harmony with Oriental forms of speech, and with the genius of Scripture diction when treating of physical events; for it is consonant with both to employ universal terms with reference to local circumstances, and to express in descriptions of physical phenomena the optical appearance, and not the philosophic reality. In fact, the universa terra, or the whole earth, of the book of Genesis, which was submerged, becomes the oikovμéve, or the inhabited world, of a subsequent writer in the sacred volume; and if this were the place to handle the question, it might readily be shown, that at the diluvian era there had been no great multiplication of the human race, and consequently no wide dispersion of them. The fact of their circumscribed limits furnishes a presumption in favour of a partial deluge; for, to accomplish the "judgment of ungodly men," confined to a small part of the earth's superficies, by bringing a flood of waters upon the existing continents, and at the same time suspending the ordinary laws of nature, in collecting from distant lands, and sustaining at a common focus, live pairs of the animal races accustomed to different climates, and addicted to discordant habitsthis would be, to say the least, a vast superfluity, and to a great extent an unmeaning catastrophe. When no recognised principle of interpretation is violated by a contrary hypothesis, which accords with zoological conclusions, we may reasonably believe the Noachian deluge to have been limited to the world of man-probably the western region of Central Asia- the native seat of most of the domesticated animals and the cereal grasses, upon which the food, clothing, and convenience of mankind depend, reproductive examples being preserved, to minister to the wants of the patriarchal family, and to multiply and migrate, in the train of their posterity, to the far-distant regions to which they have wandered,

CHAPTER XIX.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE.

N the great scheme of creation immediately around us, we have viewed unorganised matter destitute of life, and mat

ter organised, as in the grass of the field, with life, but destitute of sensation, and in the inferior animals, with life, sensation, and a portion of knowledge; but in man the scale of being rises above mere animal life and sensation, however delicate and varied, and beyond mere instinct, whatever that mysterious faculty may be, to rational existence, which constitutes him "the minister and interpreter of nature." The most sagacious and instinctive of the brute creation live and die without the least comprehension of the vast system of which they form a part; but man is capable of surveying the whole with thought and reflection, of understanding its economy and purpose, of tracing the Author of the work, and marking the display of his perfections, of yielding to Him adoration and homage, and sanctifying the varied scene to moral uses. Sometimes, in the spirit of lurking infidelity to the announcements of Scripture respecting the attention paid to our race by Divine Providence, philosophy has paraded before us its demonstrations concerning the plan of the universe, and called upon us to contemplate its stately forms and vast dimensions. We may obey its summons, and return from the contemplation with renewed ability to "vindicate the ways of God to man." For what knows the sun of his own brightness, or the lightnings of their force, or the planets of their velocity, or the ten thousand stars of their mighty proportions? The universe of material things can neither think nor feel, but is perfectly unconscious of itself; whereas man can appreciate to a certain extent its design, derive enjoyment from its objects, track their course, comprehend their laws, gather from them an intellectual apprehension of the wondrous Artificer, make them subservient to morals and devotion; and thus the grandeur of nature illustrates the greatness of man.

Linnæus placed man in the order of Quadrumana, or four-handed, in fellowship with the monkey tribe, and even considered the genus Homo as consisting of two species; the ouran-outang being the second, the congener of the human being. Cuvier, with an obvious propriety, has departed from this classification, and placed man in an order by himself, that of Bimana, or two-handed, in allusion to the prehensory organs with which he is furnished. They are instruments of essential moment to their possessor, and form a characteristic mark of his nobility, for, strictly speaking, he is the only bimane. In several physical respects, man is far inferior to many of the lower animals. The elephant is his superior in bulk and power, the hawk in sight, the antelope in swiftness, the hound in scent, and the squirrel in agility. No animal, in the infancy of existence, continues for so long a period in a state of helplessness and dependence, or suffers for an equal interval infirmity in age. To every other animal nature supplies an appropriate clothing, for which they "toil not, neither do they spin"the office of man; without which, he would live and die in the nakedness of his birth. No parallel to his case can be found in the animal kingdom, in relation to the slowness of

his growth, the variety of his wants, and the numerous diseases to which he is exposed; and while animals directly adapt to their support the food that is suited to them- the lion his flesh, and the ox his grasses the greater part of the human aliment, according to the practice of all nations, is subject to preparing processes, more or less rude or perfect, in order to be rendered agreeable and nutritious. These are apparently the hardships of the human condition: but a regard to their moral and intellectual effect will strip them of the character of disadvantages. If endowed with a high degree of physical force, if free from the necessity of culinary preparation, if naturally arrayed against the exigencies of climate, and thus constituted with a greater amount of personal independence,—it may reasonably be inferred, that civilisation would not have made its present advances, that mental capacity would have remained largely undeveloped, and the career of man have exhibited a succession of melancholy oscillation, between intemperate ferocity and selfish indolence. The sense of his weakness and the pressure of his wants have contributed to call forth his resources, to stir up "the gift and faculty divine," to rouse inventive powers to action, which would otherwise have continued dormant, and to excite benevolent affections, by the demand he is compelled to make for the society of his kind; and thus the very disabilities of his mere animal being tend to evoke his higher nature, and to accomplish one of the designed ends of his creation by sheer intellectual power, that of having "dominion over the fowl of the air, and over the fish of the sea, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth on the earth.”

The human population of the globe has been commonly rated at eight hundred millions, but this is probably an error in excess. The statements of geographers vary considerably, as appears from the following estimates of two of the most distinguished, MM. Malte Brun and Balbi. The former justly remarks, that all the calculations that have been made upon the subject are chimerical, and that it is impossible to state any which shall even approximate to the truth.

But however uncertain the numbers of the human race, maritime and inland discovery show the wide dispersion of the species, to the extreme bounds of vegetable life; and the extraordinary facility of the human frame in accommodating itself to diverse circumstances. There are but few tracts of land which have not within their limits an indigenous human population. The antarctic continent, the Falkland Isles, and Kerguelen's Land, with Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen in the northern zone, are the principal exceptions. St. Helena is also another; for when that island was discovered, in 1501, it was only occupied by seafowl, occasionally visited by seals and turtles, and covered with forest-trees and shrubs. However small the coral islands of the Pacific, and remote from continents, they have in general their families of men. The New World, though very scantily peopled, has the Esquimaux at its northern extremity, within ten degrees of the pole, and the Fuegians at its southern end, perhaps in the lowest condition in which humanity exists upon the face of the globe. In the Ancient World, we every where meet with traces of man and of his works, except in the zone of deserts; and even here he has planted his race in the oases, the verdant islets of the great ocean of sand. In situations, high and low, dry and moist, cold and hot, we find members of the family to which we belong, enduring the extremes

of temperature, a degree of heat which on the banks of the Senegal causes spirits of wine to boil, and of cold in the north-east of Asia which freezes brandy and mercury.

This wide diffusion of the species, occupying every variety of climate, soil, and situation, necessarily involves the fact of man being omnivorous, or able to derive support from all kinds of aliment; for otherwise, if his nourishment depended exclusively upon animal or vegetable food, various regions where the race exists and multiplies would be incompatible with the easy maintenance of human life. In the cold and frozen north, beyond the range of the cereal plants, where excessive poverty marks the only vegetation that appears, the tribes of Esquimaux draw their support entirely from the land and marine animals, principally from fish and seals; and this is also the case with the miserable

Esquimaux Hut.

Petcheres, inhabiting a corresponding district in the southern hemisphere, the chill and barren shores of Tierra del Fuego. On the other hand, the condition of many interior tropical countries is not propitious to the subsistence of an extended population of the domestic animals and the common cerealia, owing to the number of the beasts of prey and the interchange of a flooded and a parching soil; and there we find large families of men chiefly sustained by a peculiar farinaceous diet, the fruits of the plantain and the palm. In the temperate zone, a plentiful supply of both animal and vegetable

food is met with, which mingle in the aliment of the inhabitants. Thus, as we approach the poles, man does not live by bread at all, the Esquimaux being unacquainted with it; while approaching the equator he is mainly supported by vegetable nutriment; and intermediate between them, he is strikingly omnivorous, various kinds of grain and flesh composing the staff of life. Some naturalists have proposed a classification of mankind, according to the species of food by the use of which they are distinguished. Thus we have Carnivorous, or flesh-eaters; Ichthyophagists, or fish-eaters; Frugivorous, or fruit and corn-eaters; Acridophagists, or locust-eaters; Geophagists, or earth-eaters; Anthropophagists, or man-eaters; and Omnivorous, or devourers of everything. But we have no tribes of men that exclusively belong to any one of these classes. The only clear division that can be made of the human race, taking their food as a characteristic, is the very general one already stated, between the inhabitants of polar, temperate, and tropical regions; and growing intercommunication is constantly lessening the amount of difference even here, by transporting the aliment yielded in abundance in one district to another naturally destitute of it. The locust-eaters include some of the wandering Arabs of northern Africa and western Asia, where the crested locust, one of the largest species of the tribe, is made use of for food, both fresh and salted; in which last state it is sold in some of the markets of the Levant. Morier, in his Second Journey to Persia, observes, that locusts are sold at Bushire as food, to the lowest of the peasantry, when dried; and he adds, that "the locusts and wild honey, which St. John ate in the wilderness, are perhaps particularly mentioned to show, that he fared as the poorest of men." The Otomacs, one of the rudest of the American tribes, living on the banks of the Orinoco and its tributaries, are geophagists, or earth-eaters. When the waters are low, they live on fish and turtles; but when the rivers swell, and it becomes difficult to procure that food, they eat daily a large portion of