PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 5

being deduced from the analogies extant in each. Theseinvestigations are confirmed by the Scriptural accountthat “The whole earth was of one language and of onespeech/’ previous to the Flood , and it describes the firstmigration as coincident with the subsidence of thewaters.

That violent cataclysms have since altered the face ofthe then existing earth, the records of geological scienceamply show; and that some of mankind, in every portionof the then inhabited world, survived these catastrophes,and subsequently perpetuated the varieties of race, maybe inferred from those differences in moral and physicalfeatures which now exist, and which have sometimessuggested the impossibility of a collective derivationfrom one stock. The philological thread, although gene-rally a mere filament of extreme tenuity, holds all firmlytogether.

That animals had been domesticated in a very earlystage of man’s existence, we have distinct proof in manyrecent geological discoveries, and all these discoveriesshow the same animals to have been in every instancesubjugated; thus pointing to a primitive and earlierdomestication in the regions where both were originallyproduced. That pasture land was provided for the sus-tenance of these animals, they being chiefly herbivorous,is a necessary conclusion. Thence ensues the fairdeduction that phanerogamous, or flower-bearing plantscoexisted, and bees, consequently, necessarily too,—thusparticipating reciprocal advantages, they receiving fromthese plants sustenance, and giving them fertility.

These islands, under certain modifications, were, pre-vious to the glacial period, one land with the continent ofEinrope; and it was when thus connected that those