CHAP, XII.

which prevented their escape to freedom in the PART III. 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 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, a phænomenon in natural history; 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 cause him, either to overlook or to withhold this obvious cause? His geological 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.

CHAP. XII.

PART III. In this 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, this important fact of natural history is corrupted, and a most instructive truth is withheld from the knowledge of the juvenile reader.

The translator of Norden's Travels has fallen into a ridiculous mistake, which also may here be rectified. He thus renders his author: "We

66

saw that day (on the Nile) abundance of "camels; but they did not come near enough "for us to shoot them." And he adds in a

1 Animal Biography, vol. ii. 2.

note: "In the original it is chameaux d'eau; PART III. "whether they are a particular species of camel,

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1

or a different kind of animal, I do not know '.' These chameaux d'eau, or de la rivière, are the Gemel el Bahr of the Arabians, which is no other than the pelican; of which Buffon gives this notice: "the Egyptians have denominated "this great bird the river-camel, with allusion "to the manner in which it retains the water " in its pouch."

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 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

CHAP. XII.

1

1 P. 11, fol.

'Oiseaux, tom. viii. p. 296, 4to.

CHAP. XII.

PART III. truth and unity of the revolution, which both loaded the soils of northern Europe with animal spoils from the perished earth, and fixed the progenitors of the present race of mankind in the western regions of Asia.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAP. XIII.

How far the Creative Power was exercised upon PART III. the new earth, is a point on which we are not 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 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 demands. It is saying nothing, to say with the mineral geology, "after the deluge, vegetation quickly ensued." How did it ensue? Had the same earth remained, vegetation could not have ensued by virtue of any known law of what we term nature; for, the universal lodgment of the sea upon its surface, for nearly ten months, must, by those laws, have extinguished every prin