It is requisite for clearness and precision to reduce every thing to its simplest elements, and from its least modified state, to enumerate the changes it undergoes, and the additions it receives. But what is allowable in a work of which the sole aim is simplicity, may be very erroneous when considered as matter of fact. And though, in a treatise which accommodates itself to an arbitrary method, and not to the truth of events, mankind may be represented as passing from the occupation of hunters to that of shepherds, and then from pasturage to tillage, and a life in cities, yet, the error is great, if we mistake the process of our own minds for the progress of the human race, and imagine that men must first have existed as savages, because the savage state stands at the head of our own artificial system.

And yet this misapprehension is the sole support of a theory which is alike refuted by the evidence of revelation, and by the situation of the ancient world. From the sea of China to the German ocean, tribes, too rude to have tamed the wild animals for their own use, were in possession of domestic cattle; and beyond the bounds of civilization the pastoral state alike prevailed in Asia, Africa, and Europe. The only exceptions strengthen

the general rule: some hunters, scattered over ranges of mountains; some fishers, amid wide intersecting lakes, or some tribes deprived of their cattle by the severity of the climate towards the Icy Sea. In this respect, the new world is contrasted with the old, and in this very contrast affords an additional proof that the pastoral state has preceded the savage, since its savage inhabitants, with the strong marks of their Scythian descent, will be generally allowed to have sprung from a race in possession of numerous herds, and the only assignable cause of the difference between the hunters of America and their pastoral ancestors of Upper Asia, is the intervening sea, with the want of barks of sufficient burden to transport their cattle.

The appearances of society, over both the old and the new continent, exactly tally with the effects which must have resulted from the dispersion of mankind, as described by Moses; a dispersion which took place after a common sojourn, for a length of years, in a country favourable for the increase of their flocks; and after having had long access to the arts and knowledge of a still earlier race, by the long lives of the patriarchs, who formed a connecting link between the antediluvian and postdiluvian world. The light, which

spread over the earth, may be traced to the plains of Babylon as its centre, and the barbarism and the depression of the different tribes of men is shaded more deeply, according to their distance from the parent seats of mankind, and the difficulties of their journey.

It is from this one fount of emanation that the first vestiges of thought and improvement are derived, which are common to all nations and languages; and which have been assigned, even by infidel philosophers, to one primitive race, the stock whence the many families of the earth have sprung; who have left behind them resemblances and affinities in the remotest languages and recollections, however disguised by fable and mythology, which refer to a period when all the earth had one common history and interest.

Thus the time which elapsed between the deluge and the dispersion of mankind, must be looked upon as the first period of civilization. No doubt, owing to the early invention of arts among the descendants of Cain, and the long life of the antediluvians, so favourable to the cultivation of science, great advances would be made, and commanding heights of knowledge would be reached, by men, who could not complain, like Theophrast

us, that nature had denied them that length of days for cultivating their reason, which she bestowed upon many irrational animals; but it is not by the mass of knowledge that existed before the deluge, but by the remnants that were preserved in the ark, that aftertimes have been affected and benefited. To form some conception of the change which ancient science would undergo in the hands of the postdiluvians, we may imagine what would be the fate of a varied and copious language, which, after abounding in works of every character, came to exist only in the speech of few individuals; how the additions by which it had been enriched would fall into disuse, and the language itself would return to its first rudiments and primitive simplicity, while the derivatives would occasionally remain, and the roots from which they had sprung be forgotten. The same would it fare with science, reduced to the same circumstances, the higher and more speculative parts would be forgotten, the application might be retained without the principle, and the elements might rest behind as witnesses of the perfection to which knowledge had been brought, and of the advanced state of the sciences from which they had been separated.

Possessed of the relics of ancient language and of ancient knowledge, a new population rapidly multiplied in the land where nature had planted the olive and Noah the vine, and wandered, with their increasing flocks, beneath that serene sky where the stars were first classed into constellations, without fixed habitation in the country of their transient pilgrimage, previous to their spreading anew the tide of life over the dispeopled earth, and rearing in the wilderness once more the dwellings of men..

It is this period of universal intercommunity which has given an indissoluble bond of connection to the far scattered family of man, and irresistibly carries back whatever holds of high antiquity to the common origin of the species. Among the remotest races, dissevered by vast ages, and unnavigated oceans, fragments of language, tradition, and opinion are found, which piece in together, and when united with every remnant, from every distant region, almost recompose that body of transmitted recollections, which, surviving an earlier civilization, and an almost universal catastrophe, was separated and dispersed over the earth, by the separation and dispersion of mankind.