Martyria; or, Andersonville PrisonHamlin, Augustus C. (Augustus Choate)
History
Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison
Hamlin, Augustus C. (Augustus Choate)
Andersonville Prison; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Prisoners and prisons
Of this there is but little danger, as ethnology will show. There will not
be, under any ordinary circumstances, any intermingling of the two races,
for the law of ethnic repugnance is too great. The strong ethnic
antipathies will keep them apart. The possibility of the intermixture of
families and races so widely remote is as rigidly limited as the law of
chemical proportions, and the absorption of the minor quantity is
inevitable. Give both races the same field for expansion in these States,
and the white race will soon find itself in the minority, both of numbers
and in physical strength; for, according to natural laws, the stronger
blood always absorbs the weaker when there is unobstructed action, and
especially when climate favors vastly one of the contending types.
There are to-day four or five times as many centenarians among the blacks
as there are among the whites of the cotton regions.
In consideration of this subject of miscegenation, let us review the
phenomena that have been brought to light by the naturalists who have
studied hybridity among animals, and recall a few facts from history to
support the experimentalists.
XVI.
In the animal world, in the wild state, hybrids are rarely if ever
produced, and it is only from the experiments of the naturalists that the
law of hybridity has been explained.
We see the bipartites appear, when two kindred species mix together under
the influence of man, these animals partaking of the qualities of both.
The horse and the ass; the ass, zebra, and hermione; the wolf and the dog;
the dog and the jackal; the goat and the ram; the deer and the axis, &c.,
unite and breed; but these artificial species are not durable, and they
have only limited fecundity. "The mongrels of the dog and the wolf are
sterile from the third generation. The mongrels of the jackal and the dog
are so from the fourth. Moreover, if we unite these mongrels to one of the
two primitive species, they soon revert completely and totally to that
species.
"The mongrel of the dog and jackal contains more of the jackal than the
dog. It has the straight ears, the pendent tail; it does not bark; it is
wild. It is more jackal than dog. This is the first product of the crossed
union of the dog with the jackal. I continue to unite the successive
produce, from generation to generation, with one of the two primitive
roots,--with that of the dog, for example.
"The mongrel of the second generation does not bark yet, but it has the
ears pendent at the tip: it is less wild.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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