and the Natural Hidorij i>f' Man. ^87 



World, and especially in North America, we find the fact to be, 

 that some of the members of a previous social state, which had 

 existed in a highly civilized condition during several ages, ar- 

 rived in that continent ; where their descendants, and especially 

 those who spread themselves most widely over the newly settled 

 countries, speedily degenerated from the cultivation of the pa- 

 rent stock. Could it so have happened, that all further com- 

 munication with the Old World had ceased, the deterioration 

 which had commenced would unquestionably have proceeded 

 still farther ; but this process has been checked by the continual 

 arrivals of fresh settlers from the mother country, and the con- 

 stant communications between the two continents, which have, 

 in a great measure, maintained an equality between their re- 

 spective inhabitants. But let it be supposed that these Euro- 

 pean settlers in North America had been the only remains of a 

 former race of mankind : it is evident that, whatever in the 

 course of ages might be the character and condition of their 

 descendants, — even if some of them in the extreme western pro- 

 vinces of America, or in other countries into which they might 

 have spread, had become so debased and brutalized as not to be 

 recognised as belonging to the same race, — still, in the con- 

 sideration of their history, and in the endeavour to trace to their 

 pristine state, their laws, their customs, and their religion, how- 

 ever altered, however perverted or corrupted they might become, 

 it would be utterly inconsistent that reference should (in the 

 first instance at least,) be made to any other stock than the Euro- 

 pean colonists from vvhom they had sprung, or to any other con- 

 dition of society than that previous artificial one of which those 

 Europeans themselves had been members. 



May not, then, the history of the whole human race be con- 

 sidered in a similar point of view to that in which the history of 

 the North American colonists has thus hypothetically been re- 

 garded } If we look to the histories, traditions, and fables, of 

 all nations, we find that they all coincide in expressly recording or 

 in alluding to a cataclysm, — the particulars of which are the most 

 fully and circumstantially detailed in the Sacred Writings of the 

 Israelitish nation, — which overwhelmed the whole of mankind, 

 with the exception of a {i^vi favoured individuals, who became 

 the founders of the subsequent human race : and if, therefore, 



