to rebuke the Dutch for treating them like "wild beasts". From the perspective of a Lowland Scot Protestant, Knox's racist works espoused extreme racial hostility to Celts in general (including the Highland Scots and Welsh people, but particularly the Irish people). He considered the "Caledonian Celt" as touching "the end of his career: they are reduced to about one hundred and fifty thousand" and that the "Welsh Celts are not troublesome, but might easily become so." For Knox, "the Irish Celt is the most to be dreaded" and openly advocated their ethnic cleansing around the time that the Great Famine was happening, stating in The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850): "The source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts. Look at Wales, look at Caledonia; it is ever the same. [...] The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for the clearing the land of all Papists and Jacobites; this means Celts. If left to themselves, they would clear them out, as Cromwell proposed, by the sword; it would not require six weeks to accomplish the work. But the Encumbered Estates Relief Bill will do it better." Transcendentalism In his writings Knox synthesised a perspective on nature from three of the most influential natural historians of his time. From Cuvier, he took a consciousness of the great epochs of time, of the fact of extinction, and of the inadequacy of the biblical account. From Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire and Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, he gained a spatial and thematic perspective on living things. If one had the skill, all living beings could be arranged in their correct placing in a notional table, and one would see both internally and externally the elegant variation of their organs and anatomy according to the principles of connection, unity of composition and compensation. Goethe is another crucial addition to the Knoxian way of looking at nature. Goethe thought that there were transcendental archetypes in the living world which could be perceived by genus. If the natural historian were perspicacious enough to examine the creatures in this correct order he could perceive—aesthetically—the archetype that was immanent in the totality of a series, although present in none of them. Knox wrote that he was concerned