LITERARY NOTICES. 



119 



the present day, but lent for a while to 

 Primitive Man in order to enable hirn to 

 communicate with his fellows, and then 

 withdrawn when its purpose was accom- 

 plished. 



" Perhaps, after all, it will be found that 

 the principal obstacle to belief in the ra- 

 tional origin of Language is an excusable 

 repugnance to think of Man as having ever 

 been in so brutish a condition of life as is 

 implied in the want of speech. Imagination 

 has always delighted to place the cradle of 

 our race in a golden age of innocent enjoy- 

 ment, and the more rational views of what 

 the course of life must have been before the 

 race had acquired the use of significant 

 speech, or had elaborated for themselves 

 the most necessary arts of subsistence, are 

 felt by unreflecting piety as derogatory to 

 the dignity of Man and the character of a 

 beneficent Creator. But this is a danger- 

 ous line of thought, and the only safe rule 

 in speculating on the possible dispensations 

 of Providence (as has been well pointed out 

 by Mr. Farrar) is the observation of the 

 various conditions in which it is actually 

 allotted to Man (without any choice of his 

 own) to carry on his life. What is actually 

 allowed to happen to any family of Man 

 cannot be incompatible either with the 

 goodness of God or with His views of the 

 dignity of the human race. And God is no 

 respecter of persons or of races. However 

 hard or degrading the life of the Fuegian or 

 the Bushman may appear 'to us, it can be no 

 impeachment of the Divine love to suppose 

 that our own progenitors were exposed to 

 a similar struggle. 



" We have only the choice of two alter- 

 natives. We must either suppose that Man 

 was created in a civilized state, ready in- 

 structed in the arts necessary for the con- 

 duct of life, and was permitted to fall back 

 into the degraded condition which we wit- 

 ness among savage tribes ; or else, that he 

 started from the lowest grade, and rose 

 toward a higher state of being, by the ac- 

 cumulated acquisitions in arts and knowl- 

 edge of generation after generation, and by 

 the advantage constantly given to superior 

 capacity in the struggle for life. Of these 

 alternatives, that which embodies the notion 

 of continued progress is most in accordance 

 vith all our experience of the general course 



of events, notwithstanding the apparent 

 stagnation of particular races, and the bar- 

 barism and misery occasionally caused by 

 violence and warfare. We have witnessed 

 a notable advance in the conveniences of life 

 in our own time, and, when we look back as 

 far as history will reach, we find our ances- 

 tors in the condition of rude barbarians. 

 Beyond the reach of any written records we 

 have evidence that the country was inhab- 

 ited by a race of hunters (whether our pro- 

 genitors or not) who sheltered in caves, and 

 carried on their warfare with the wild beasts 

 with the rudest weapons of chipped flint. 

 Whether the owners of these earliest relics 

 of the human race were speaking men or 

 not, who shall say ? It is certain only that 

 Language is not the innate inheritance of 

 our race ; that it must have begun to be 

 acquired by some definite generation in the 

 pedigree of Man ; and as many intelligent and 

 highly-social kinds of animals, as elephants, 

 for instance, or beavers, live in harmony 

 without the aid of this great convenience of 

 social life, there is no apparent reason why 

 our own race should not have led their life 

 on earth for an indefinite period before they 

 acquired the use of speech ; whether before 

 that epoch the progenitors of the race ought 

 to be called by the name of Man or not. 



" Geologists, however, universally look 

 back to a period when the earth was peo- 

 pled only by animal races, without a trace 

 of human existence ; and the mere absence 

 of Man among an animal population of the 

 world is felt by no one as repugnant to a 

 thorough belief in the providential rule of 

 the Creator. Why, then, should such a 

 feeling be roused by the complementary 

 theory which bridges over the interval to 

 the appearance of Man, and supposes that 

 one of the races of the purely animal period 

 was gradually raised in the scale of intelli- 

 gence, by the laws of variation affecting all 

 procreative kinds of being, until the pro- 

 geny, in the course of generations, attained 

 to so enlarged an understanding as to be- 

 come capable of appreciating each other's 

 motives ; of being moved to admiration and 

 love by the exhibition of loving courage, or 

 to indignation and hate by malignant con- 

 duct ; of finding enjoyment or pain in the 

 applause or reprobation of their fellows, or 

 of their own reflected thoughts ; and, soonei 



