and were never suffered to escape from domesticity like individuals of every other species; and therefore, they ALONE never recovered their primitive state of independence and liberty. Hence, they were always accounted a race pertaining to Arabia1; in which region they have been transmitted in a direct line, from the patriarch who introduced them, as a reserved property of one branch of his descendants. And, the same care that prevented their escape to freedom in the first age of the renovated globe, is still notoriously exercised in their preservation. It is equally notorious, that the Arabs, to this day, hold their camel in peculiar veneration, accounting it a sacred animal, a gift of God to man; the origin of which traditionary sentiment, may reasonably be referred to the origin of this postdiluvian race.

Thus, then, a cause is incidentally found in the record, which perfectly explains, and which alone can explain, an animal phenomenon, as mysterious to natural history as the existence of the misletoe in vegetation; but, which the professed Historian of Nature had not either the skill to detect, or the frankness to avow. And, what was it that so warped his mind as to make him either overlook or withhold this obvious cause? his geological

1

άι

καμηλοί αμφότεραι, άι Βακτριαναι, και αι Αραβιαι.—ARISTOT. Hist. Animal. lib. ii. cap. 1. " Camelos inter armenta pascit Oriens, Bac"triæ et Arabia."-PLIN. Nat. Hist. lib. viii. cap. 26. Hardouin.

2 "Les Arabes regardent le Chameau comme un présent du ciel, un "animal sacré."-BUFFON, Hist. Nat. du Chameau.

prepossessions: for, how should the framer and propounder of a theory which maintained, that this earth was originally a lump of matter knocked off from the body of the sun, by some rude and awkward comet which struck against it in the eccentricity of its orbit, resort for the cause of the domesticity of an entire race of animals to the authority of a record, which contradicts and exposes his false and lunatic theory?

It may be advisable, to notice here a very material error in a work professedly designed for the instruction of youth in natural history. In that work, treating of the Arabian camel, the author states: "the Arabian camel is chiefly "found in a wild state in the deserts of Arabia "and Africa, and in the temperate parts of "Asia. It is that with a single hunch on its back. "In many parts of the East it is domesticated1." The whole of this statement, is in direct contradiction to the fact. The author omits all mention of the Bactrian camel, with two hunches, which alone exists in a wild state; and that, in no other part of the globe but in Chinese Tartary, and the regions contiguous to it. But, the Arabian camel exists not in a wild state, either in Asia or in Africa; and, the individuals of that species are not domesticated, but the entire race is born domestic. By this statement therefore, which manifests a negligent confusion of the two species, this im

portant fact of natural history is corrupted, and a most instructive truth is excluded from the knowledge of the juvenile reader.

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The translator of Norden's Travels has fallen into a ridiculous mistake, which also may here be rectified. He thus renders his author: "We saw that day (on the Nile) abundance of camels; but they did not come near enough for us 66 to shoot them." And he adds in a note: "In "the original it is chameaux d'eau (water-camels); "whether they are a particular species of camel,

or a different kind of animal, I do not know." This chameau d'eau or de la rivière, the Gemel el Bahr of the Arabians, is no other than the pelican, of which Buffon gives this notice; "the Egyptians "have denominated this great bird the rivercamel, in allusion to the manner in which it "retains the water in its pouch2.

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The domesticity of the entire race of this peculiar species of camel, is therefore a living and perpetual evidence, both of the revolution in which the whole animal creation perished excepting a reserved few, and of that also in which the human race was first established on the continent of Asia; and it is therefore evidence, that those revolutions, supposed by the mineral geology to be different and distinct, were, in fact and truth, one and the same. Bishop Watson remarked, that he never saw a Jew but he beheld in him a living testimony

1 Page 11, fol.

"Hist. Nat. des Oiseaux, tom. viii. p. 296, 4to.

of the truth of the Old Testament; in the same manner, we never see a camel of this species, but we may behold in it a living testimony of the truth and unity of the revolution, which both loaded the soils of northern Europe with animal fragments from the perished earth, and fixed the progenitors of the present race of mankind in the western regions of Asia.

GEOLOGIES. 209

CHAP. XIII. MINERAL AND MOSAICAL GEOLOGIES.

CHAPTER XIII.

How far the CREATIVE POWER was exercised upon the new earth, is a point on which we are not expressly informed; although we are left to deduce the assurance of its exercise, with respect to vegetation. Where we cannot look for operation in secondary causes, we must necessarily resort to the first principle of universal physics, the intelligence and power of God. The vegetation

which invested the mineral surface rendered dry by the second revolution, cannot be philosophically ascribed to any other cause, than that which invested with vegetation the mineral surface rendered dry by the first revolution: this is an induction, which reason does not merely allow, but positively demand. It is saying nothing, to say with the mineral geology, after the deluge, vegetation How did it ensue? Had the

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quickly ensued1."

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same terrestrial surface remained, vegetation could not have ensued by virtue of any law of what we term nature; for, the universal lodgment of the sea upon it for nearly ten months, must, by those laws, have extinguished every principle of germinating life. But, it was not the same, but another, a new, brute, marine surface,

VOL. II.

KIRWAN, Geol. Essays, p. 98.

P