nged into a crow, or a magpie, or a woodpecker,
or a chicken; has never, in fact, become anything else than a pigeon.
Dogs are also somewhat variable in their varieties, and Mr. Darwin
relies greatly upon supposed variations from some one assumed ancestral
pair of dogs, into the greyhound, mastiff, terrier, and lapdog. But
granting all these unproven variations, no instance is alleged of a dog
ever becoming a cat or a lion by any care or culture.

It will not do to allege, that, for anything we know to the contrary,
our present breeds of domestic animals and plants may be so different
from those called by the same names in ancient times as to be really
different species.

We do know many things to the contrary. In the tombs of the Egyptians,
and the sculptures of the Assyrians, we have pictures of the various
plants, birds, and animals, from three to four thousand years old, as
well as of man, the most domestic animal of the whole. These paintings
and sculptures assure us that in all those millenniums domestication has
not produced the slightest change in the races of animals, plants, or
men. The Ethiopian has not changed his skin, nor the leopard his spots.
The negro was then the same black-skinned, woolly-headed, flat-nosed,
thick-lipped, long-heeled person he is to-day, as pompous, good-humored,
and fond of finery. The Assyrian statues are good, recognizable
likenesses of eminent living Jewish merchants, in London and New
Orleans. The old Pharaohs of the monuments can be matched for face and
figure any day in the bazars of Cairo. The greyhound of the tombs is the
same variety now used for coursing hares in the desert. The camel, the
ass, and the Arab, and Assyrian breeds of horses, have not been at all
improved in forty centuries. Even Mr. Darwin's favorite pigeons would
seem to have ceased to vary; for the carrier-pigeons let loose by
Sesostris, to carry the news of his coronation to all the cities of
Egypt, do not differ a feather from the modern Egyptian carrier-pigeons.
The various wild animals, and many of the plants, are represented on
these monuments in great variety. Among these I have noted the lotus,
the papyrus, the leek, the palm, wheat, barley, and millet; the
crocodile, the frog, the crane, the flamingo, the ibis, the goose, the
owl, the ostrich, the peacock; and of beasts the now famous ancestral
ape, Ptolemy's tame lion, the leopard, the gazelle, the hippopotamus,
the giraffe, and the wild boar, and