the wilderness, He
re-established it in the land of Canaan. This is the origin of the most
perfectly developed race of the present time. Whether in the tropics or
in the most northern latitudes, the Jew is the same intellectual and
physical man, and carries about with him the indelible marks of a
descendant of those patriarchs who were commanded not to intermarry
with the people among whom they dwelt. The Jew may wander and sojourn
in strange lands, but he cherishes with national pride the blood of
Abraham, which he insists still flows in his veins, and he is most
careful, of all things, to transmit it pure to his children. Though
Canaan abounded with fragments of nationalities, his boast is that his
blood is not intermixed with any of them. To the history of the Jews we
might add the experience of the Franciscan missionaries of California,
that for a healthy offspring a man must marry among his own clan.

The constant complaints we hear of the deterioration of imported
animals of choice breeds is the result of a disregard of this law of
propagation. The importations of Merino sheep, and afterward of the
Saxon, proved a failure chiefly from this cause. Those engaged in the
importation of English cattle begin already to make the same complaint,
which they would not have done had they taken the precaution to import
their foreign stock in families. The Mulatto is an apparent, not a real
exception to the rule. He is superior to the Negro, often superior to
his white father; but it is a superiority for a generation only, and
carries with it the seeds of its own dissolution. The mule is superior
to the donkey, but lasts only for a generation. The Oregon ox, a cross
between the Spanish and American breeds, is superior to either of the
pure breeds. But it is the concentration in one animal of what might be
the material of divers generations.

I once asked a Dutchess county farmer the cause of the great
superiority of his crops of wheat over those of his neighbors, and his
reply was that he always brought his seed from a distance, changed it
often, and took good care not to let it intermix with the wheat of that
region. The same, or, rather, greater results have attended the
transportation of American seeds and plants to California, where a new
soil and a new climate has produced upon all the staples of agriculture
such an improvement as to astonish men who have made this branch of
industry a study. It is the result of the migr