On the subject of the Postscript of yours of August the 16th and of Mrs. Adams’s letter, I am silent.  I know the depth of the affliction it has caused, and can sympathize with it the more sensibly, inasmuch as there is no degree of affliction, produced by the loss of those dear to us, which experience has not taught me to estimate.  I have ever found time and silence the only medicine, and these but assuage, they never can suppress, the deep-drawn sigh which recollection for ever brings up, until recollection and life are extinguished together.  Ever affectionately yours.

Th:  Jefferson.

LETTER CXV.—­TO JOHN ADAMS, October 28, 1813

TO JOHN ADAMS.

Monticello, October 28, 1813.

Dear Sir,

According to the reservation between us, of taking up one of the subjects of our correspondence at a time, I turn to your letters of August the 16th and September the 2nd.

The passage you quote from Theognis, I think has an ethical rather than a political object.  The whole piece is a moral exhortation,

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and this passage particularly seems to be a reproof to man, who, while with his domestic animals he is curious to improve the race, by employing always the finest male, pays no attention to the improvement of his own race, but intermarries with the vicious, the ugly, or the old, for considerations of wealth or ambition.  It is in conformity with the principle adopted afterwards by the Pythagoreans, and expressed by Ocellus in another form;

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which, as literally as intelligibility will admit, may be thus translated; ’Concerning the interprocreation of men, how, and of whom it shall be, in a perfect manner, and according to the laws of modesty and sanctity, conjointly, this is what I think right.  First, to lay it down that we do not commix for the sake of pleasure, but of the procreation of children.  For the powers, the organs, and desires for coition have not been given by God to man for the sake of pleasure, but for the procreation of the race.  For as it were incongruous for a mortal born to partake of divine life, the immortality of the race being taken away, God fulfilled the purpose by making the generations uninterrupted and continuous.  This, therefore, we are especially to lay down as a principle, that coition is not for the sake of pleasure.’  But nature, not trusting to this moral and abstract motive, seems to have provided more securely for the perpetuation of the species, by making it the effect of the oestrum implanted in the constitution of both sexes.  And not only has the commerce of love been indulged on this unhallowed impulse, but made subservient also to wealth and ambition by marriages, without regard to the beauty, the healthiness, the understanding, or virtue of the subject from which we are to breed.  The selecting the best male for a Haram of well chosen females, also, which Theognis seems to recommend from the example of our sheep and asses, would doubtless improve the human, as it does the brute animal, and produce a race of veritable