ation of plants where
there are no plants of the same character to intermix, and so
deteriorate the race by crossing the breed. In trees the same law holds
unchangeably. We produce fine fruit by inoculation and by grafting; but
experience has taught us never to inoculate upon a grafted stem, but
always upon a natural branch. As the Conquistadors selected the
best-looking Indian women for the mothers of the Meztizos, so the
fruit-raiser selects the best natural stems to inoculate with his
artificial varieties of fruit. In this way we get better fruit by
exhausting the root, and a whole race of plants are sometimes worn out
by mixture from too close a proximity of the different families of the
same genus. In the laws which Moses gave to the children of Israel, we
find a provision against the evils of intermixtures in the precept:
"Thy cattle shall not gender with diverse kind." "Thou shalt not sow
the field with, divers seeds." In these precepts God has taken care to
guard the wholesome generation of plants as well as of animals.

The successful intermingling of the Protestant Anglo-Saxon immigration
with our own people in the second and third generations is not an
exception to the law of generation, as both are but branches of the
same stock, and are successfully planted together. Nor is the mortality
which follows the Catholic immigration an exception to the beneficial
law of migration, for habits of intemperance account for the short
lives of these immigrants; and though their offspring is abundant, yet
it is all tainted with an inheritance of disease, and too many of the
children suffer the ruinous consequences of having drawn "still slops"
from a mother's breast in infancy. For physically, and in the chain of
generation, most truly are the sins of the fathers visited upon the
children to the third and fourth generation.

Our collection of material for an argument will be complete when I have
added that the trees most prolific of artificial fruit die the
earliest, and suffer most from running sores; that the vines cultivated
artificially to produce the choicest wines suffer most from the mildew,
and the potatoes of the most artificial varieties are the ones that
have suffered most from the rot. When the cholera first visited Mexico,
its passage through the country was like the ravages of the Angel of
Death among the Meztizos and the fragments of decaying races. And this
progress toward depopulation can not be stayed