192 MR STARK ON THE SUPPOSED PROGRESS OF HUMAN SOCIETY 



of the Deity and moral responsibility, else our race had never gone beyond those 

 tribes of animals which, with much of the human form, have never advanced one 

 step from their original condition. If the first man's knowledge was not intui- 

 tive had not been communicated directly to him by his Maker, he never could 

 have availed himself of any one of the advantages which knowledge is supposed 

 to give to rational beings. By no mental process could he have ascertained that 

 seeds buried in the soil would be multiplied twenty-fold by an unknown process, 

 or that the animals which fled at his approach might be tamed and increased at 

 his will. And none of the ordinary sources of knowledge, the result of slow ex- 

 periment or years of observation, open to the ingenuity of his descendants, could 

 have been available to the first agriculturist and shepherd. 



II. DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS. 



II. I now come, in the second place, to make a few observations on the Do- 

 mestication of Animals, which is considered by many to follow, as a necessary 

 consequence, the civilization of man. This also, according to the classical theory, 

 was a work of time ; and the results of domestication, as now seen, the ultimate 

 effect of ages of training. Even the opinions of the few who have questioned the 

 theory of man's savage origin are, on this point, in accordance with the supposi- 

 tion which assumes that all animals were originally wild, and required to be 

 caught and tamed, and trained to obedience, before becoming useful to man. 

 But this assumption, like that of man's savage origin, rests upon similar baseless 

 assertions, and is equally devoid of truth as probability. 



The error, on the one hand, has originated in supposing man to have been 

 created a savage, little better than a brute, and in supposing that all his subse- 

 quent improvement, even the power of speech, originated from the exercise of his 

 own physical and intellectual faculties ; and, on the other, in omitting to take 

 into consideration two indispensable elements of increase and civilization, without 

 which, indeed, man could not, confessedly, have advanced a single step, I mean 

 the possession of Domestic Animals and the Cultivation of the Cerealia. The ani- 

 mals they suppose to have existed in a wild state, till the period of society ar- 

 rived when it became necessary for the demands of an increasing population that 

 they should be tamed ; and the seeds of the Cerealia, or grains, it is not explained 

 how, were to be at the command of the multiplied shepherds, whenever they 

 were forced to exchange the pastoral life for one devoted to the tillage of the 

 ground. No even plausible grounds are stated how or where these necessary ap- 

 pendages to civilized life should be found in numbers or quantity when so wanted, 

 and if such auxiliaries were within reach at these uncertain periods, why might 

 their use not have been contemporary with man's earliest existence ? why might 

 he not have reaped all the advantages which their possession implies, from the 



