the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight
belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans, planting
themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and
monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and
victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of
the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been
expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable
conclusions of Knox, in his "Fragment of Races,"--a rash and
unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgettable truths.
"Nature respects race, and not hybrids." "Every race has its own
_habitat_." "Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the
crab." See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like
the negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried
over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to
make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green
grass on the prairie.

One more faggot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new science of
Statistics. It is a rule, that the most casual and extraordinary
events--if the basis of population is broad enough--become matter of fixed
calculation. It would not be safe to say when a captain like Bonaparte, a
singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator like Bowditch, would be born in
Boston: but, on a population of twenty or two hundred millions, something
like accuracy may be had.[17]

'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They
have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine,
of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps
himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure,
just so far as the need is. 'Tis hard to find the right Homer, Zoroaster,
or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or
Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are
scores and centuries of them. "The air is full of men." This kind of
talent so abounds, this constructive tool-making efficiency, as if it
adhered to the chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of
Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.

Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a mathematician,
a comic poet, a mystic. No one can read the history of astronomy, without
perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not