used, but that the greater number of them
remain so splendidly, so manifestly, so eternally distinct; and that
the vile industries and vicious curiosities of modern science, while
they have robbed the fields of England of a thousand living creatures,
have not created in them one.

61. But even in the paltry knowledge we have obtained, what unanimity
have we?--what security? Suppose any man of ordinary sense, knowing the
value of time, and the relative importance of subjects of thought, and
that the whole scientific world was agog concerning the origin of
species, desired to know first of all--what was meant by a species.

He would naturally look for the definition of species first among the
higher animals, and expect it to be best defined in those which were
best known. And being referred for satisfaction to the 226th page of
the first volume of Mr. Darwin's "Descent of Man," he would find this
passage:--

"Man has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and
yet there is the greatest possible diversity among capable judges,
whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two
(Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six
(Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen
(Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty
(Crawford), or as sixty-three according to Burke."

And in the meantime, while your men of science are thus vacillating, in
the definition of the species of the only animal they have the
opportunity of studying inside and out, between one and sixty-three;
and disputing about the origin, in past ages, of what they cannot
define in the present ones; and deciphering the filthy heraldries which
record the relation of humanity to the ascidian and the crocodile, you
have ceased utterly to distinguish between the two species of man,
evermore separate by infinite separation: of whom the one, capable of
loyalty and of love, can at least conceive spiritual natures which have
no taint from their own, and leave behind them, diffused among
thousands on earth, the happiness they never hoped, for themselves, in
the skies; and the other, capable only of avarice, hatred, and shame,
who in their lives are the companions of the swine, and leave in death
nothing but food for the worm and the vulture.

62. Now I have first traced for you the relations of the creature we
are examining to those beneath it and above, to the bat