378 NOTION OF DEGENERACY CONTROVERTED. chap. six. 



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

 Man would more and more resemble the brutes in that attri- 

 bute which causes one generation exactly to imitate in all its 

 ways the generation which pi-eceded it. 



The extent to which even a considerably advanced state of 

 civilization 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 forever among them, he could only 

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

 us 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 civilized though more warlike, or that, 

 during social and political revolutions, people have retrograded 

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

 ul" some higher and more educated caste which has been 

 •iostroyed, 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 

 })()wers, and with inspired knowledge, and had possessed the 

 same impi'ovable nature as their posterity, the j^oint 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 scared}' form a conception, and 

 very different would have been the character of the works of 

 art which we should now be endeavoring to interpret, — those 

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



