CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE. 115 



ledge has been lost, or, whilst preserving their ancient civilisa- 

 tion and firmly established complex civil institutions, as is the 

 case with China, they have made extremely little progress in 

 science and in the industrial arts, and have been still more de- 

 ficient in participation in that intercourse with the rest of the 

 world, without which general views cannot be formed. The 

 cultivated nations of Europe, and their descendants trans- 

 planted to other continents, have, by the gigantic extension of 

 their maritime enterprises, made themselves, as it were, at 

 home simultaneously on almost every coast; and those 

 shores which they do not yet possess they threaten. In their 

 almost uninterruptedly inherited knowledge, and in their far- 

 descended scientific nomenclature, we may discover land-marks 

 in the history of mankind, recalling the various paths or chan- 

 nels by which important discoveries or inventions, or at least 

 their germs, have been conveyed to the nations of Europe. 

 Thus from Eastern Asia has been handed down the know- 

 ledge of the directive force and declination of a freely-sus- 

 pended magnetic bar ; from Phoenicia and Egypt, the know- 

 ledge of chemical preparations (as glass, animal and vegeta- 

 ble colouring substances, and metallic oxides) ; and from 

 India, the general use of position in determining the greater 

 or less value of a few numerical signs. 



Since civilisation has left its early seats in the tropical or 

 sub -tropical zone, it has fixed itself permanently in that 

 part of the world, of which the most northern portions are 

 less cold than the same latitudes in Asia and America. I 

 have already shewn how the continent of Europe is indebted 

 for the mildness of its climate, so favourable to general 

 civilisation, to its character as a western peninsula of Asia ; 

 to the broken and varied configuration of its coast Ike, 



