378 NOTION OF DEGENERACY CONTROVERTED. CHAP. xix. 



a century in modern times, and in ages still more remote 

 Man would more and more resemble the brutes in that 

 attribute which causes one generation exactly to imitate in 

 all its ways the generation which preceded it. 



The extent to which even a considerably advanced state of 

 civilisation may become fixed and stereotyped for ages, is the 

 wonder of Europeans who travel in the East. One of my 

 friends declared to me, that whenever the natives expressed 

 to him a wish ' that he might live a thousand years,' the idea 

 struck him as by no means extravagant, seeing that if he 

 were doomed to sojourn for ever among them, he could only 

 hope to exchange in ten centuries as many ideas, and to witness 

 as much progress, as he could do at home in half a century. 



It has sometimes happened that one nation has been con 

 quered by another less civilised though more warlike, or that, 

 during social and political revolutions, people have retrograded 

 in knowledge. In such cases, the traditions of earlier ages, or 

 of some higher and more educated caste which has been 

 destroyed, may give rise to the notion of degeneracy from a 

 primeval state of superior intelligence, or of science super- 

 naturally communicated. But had the original stock of 

 mankind been really endowed with such superior intellectual 

 powers, and with inspired knowledge, and had possessed the 

 same improvable nature as their posterity, the point of ad 

 vancement which they would have reached ere this would 

 have been immeasurably higher. We cannot ascertain at 

 present the limits, whether of the beginning or the end, of 

 the first stone period, when Man coexisted with the extinct 

 mammalia, but that it was of great duration we cannot 

 doubt. During those ages there would have been time for 

 progress of which we can Scarcely form a conception, and 

 very different would have been the character of the works of 

 art which we should now be endeavouring to interpret, those 

 relics which we are now disinterring from the old gravel-pits 



