venting the most necessary arts of life. Nature has furnished the inferior animals with many and powerful instincts to direct them in the choice of their food, and with natural instruments peculiarly adapted to enable them, either by climbing the forest tree for its fruits, or by digging in the earth for nutricious roots, to obtain it, in sufficient quantities for the sustenance of life. But man, destitute of the nice and accurate instincts of other animals, as well as of the effectual means which they possess of procuring their provision, must have been the most forlorn of all creatures, although destined to be lord of the creation; unless we can suppose him, like the primitive man of the sacred scriptures, to have been placed in a rich garden which offered him, at hand, its abundant and spontaneous fruits. Cast out, an orphan of nature, naked and helpless, into the savage forest, he must have perished before he could have learned how to supply his most immediate and urgent wants. Suppose him to have been created, or to have started into being, we know not how, in the full strength of his bodily powers, how long must it have been before he could have known the proper use of his limbs, or how to apply them to climb the tree, and run out upon its limbs to gather its fruit, or to grope in the earth for

roots, to the choice of which he could not be led by his smell, and for the collection of which the human hand, especially in its soft, and original state, is most imperfectly adapted. Very inadequate must have been the supply obtained by these means, if a supply could have been obtained at all, for wants the most pressing and importunate in our nature, and for appetites the calls of which, in such a state, wherein its supplies must always be both scanty, and difficult to be procured, could never be intermitted. We are prone to judge of the mental powers of such a being, in the first moments of his existence, by the faculties which we perceive in ourselves, or observe among savages with whom we are acquainted, whose minds have been, in a degree, improved and strengthened by experience. The American savage, for example, has been taught from his infancy the necessary arts for supplying his wants. But the primitive man, we suppose him to have received no communication of knowledge from his Creator, and to have been abandoned merely to his own powers, without the least aid from experience, or instruction, would have been nothing but a large infant. Reason, the supreme prerogative of our nature, and its chief distinction from that of the inferior animals, could have

if

availed him little in that emergency. It would have required, in order to its exercise, a knowledge of principles, and of the nature of the objects around him, which could have been the result only of time, and a certain degree of experience. In the mean time, that recent mass of organized matter, called a man, would probably have perished.*

*If it be asked how those few wild men, who, at different times, have been found in the forests of Europe have preserved themselves, if, as has been conjectured, they were exposed in infancy?—I believe rather that they have been lost in the forests after the period of infancy and childhood, and when they had already acquired some knowledge of the manner of gathering certain fruits, and, perhaps, of taking by art the smaller species of game. The youth who, not long since, was found in a wood in France, appeared, by a scar which he had upon his person, to have been one of those victims who escaped from the knife of the fanatical revolutionists, while probably his parents were murdered, or were obliged to leave him in their flight. However this may be, he, and all the others who have been found in similar situations, have been so affected, probably with terror when they found themselves abandoned, that they seem to have been bereft of a great portion of the native powers of intellect, and rendered incapable of the ordinary exercises of reason. They resembled brutes more than men. Attentive only to the calls of hunger, and the objects with which they were accustomed to satisfy that appetite, they seemed to be capable of no other ideas. They could not be made to understand the advantages, nor relish the habits of civilized life. And whenever they could escape from their keepers, were ready, like the wildest animals,

But, if we believe that, in this deplorable condition, he could have found means to sustain life, man, originally a savage, and a savage in the most abject state in which it is possible for human nature to exist, must have remained a savage for ever. Urged by the most pressing wants of nature, for which all his exertions, undirected by skill, and unassisted by the natural arms which other creatures possess, could have furnished but a scanty supply, and which, therefore would have never ceased one moment to harass him, he would not have enjoyed leisure to invent any of those arts which enter into the first elements of civilized life. An importunate appetite, with brutal impulse, would have so continually precipitated him from object to object in order to gratify its cravings, that he could have redeemed no portion of his time for contemplating the powers of nature, or for combining his observations in such a manner as to apply those powers in ingenious inventions, for an

to dart into the forests again. These miserable beings, and not a modern savage who has derived a few arts from his ancestors, and they, at some remote period, from a more civilized people, are the proper types of the primitive man thrown like a helpless and abandoned infant from the hand of his Creator, upon the wild and desolate surface of the new world.

ticipating his wants, or for facilitating their supply. If he could indulge a moment's repose from the importunity of hunger, it would be to resign the next moment to absolute inaction, like a satiated beast in his den. The character of a savage is infinitely improvident. Nothing he abhors so much as labor, when he is not under the immediate impulse of some imperious appetite, or passion. The American savage, who possesses many advantages above the primitive man whom we are contemplating, as soon as he is released from the fatigues of the chace, generally gives himself up to listless and gloomy indolence. And, though he has derived from his ancestors, who probably emigrated from different regions in the old world, the rudiments of the arts of hunting and fishing, which might have been expected to lay a foundation for a further progress in improving the comforts of his condition; yet with these rude and scanty arts the indolent genius of savagism has been contented; and, during three centuries since America was first discovered by Europeans, he has not been known to advance a single step in the amelioration of his state. Even in those situations in which he has had the most favourable opportunities to observe the benefits resulting from agriculture and the me