there will be some who just manage to get through only by the help of
the slightest accident. I recollect reading an account of the famous
retreat of the French troops, under Napoleon, from Moscow. Worn out,
tired, and dejected, they at length came to a great river over which
there was but one bridge for the passage of the vast army. Disorganised
and demoralised as that army was, the struggle must certainly have been
a terrible one--every one heeding only himself, and crushing through
the ranks and treading down his fellows. The writer of the narrative,
who was himself one of those who were fortunate enough to succeed in
getting over, and not among the thousands who were left behind or
forced into the river, ascribed his escape to the fact that he saw
striding onward through the mass a great strong fellow,--one of the
French Cuirassiers, who had on a large blue cloak--and he had enough
presence of mind to catch and retain a hold of this strong man's
cloak. He says, "I caught hold of his cloak, and although he swore at
me and cut at and struck me by turns, and at last, when he found he
could not shake me off, fell to entreating me to leave go or I should
prevent him from escaping, besides not assisting myself, I still kept
tight hold of him, and would not quit my grasp until he had at last
dragged me through." Here you see was a case of selective saving--if
we may so term it--depending for its success on the strength of the
cloth of the Cuirassier's cloak. It is the same in nature; every
species has its bridge of Beresina; it has to fight its way through and
struggle with other species; and when well nigh overpowered, it may be
that the smallest chance, something in its colour, perhaps--the
minutest circumstance--will turn the scale one way or the other.

Suppose that by a variation of the black race it had produced the white
man at any time--you know that the Negroes are said to believe this to
have been the case, and to imagine that Cain was the first white man,