MENTAL AND CORPOREAL, 261 



other portions of the creation. For had not man's 

 invention taught him the means of destroying, or 

 of defending himself against the attacks of the 

 offensive animals, his own species would soon 

 have become extinct; and had he been ignorant 

 of the mode of domesticating and calling into use 

 the more timid ones, his food must have been 

 limited to a vegetable diet, for which his consti- 

 tution is not adapted ; his body would have lost 

 its best covering; those animal substances, which, 

 independently of food and clothing, now contri- 

 bute to his commercial prosperity, would have 

 been withheld; and deprived of those beasts of 

 burden which, at present facilitate his operations 

 far beyond the means of his own physical powers, 

 and without which, his agriculture and his trade 

 would have been of no avail; he soon would have 

 lost the great incentive to action by which his 

 influence in the creation is preserved, and he 

 would have fallen a prey to the first ferocious 

 animal which accident had placed in his track. 



Jf we advert to the agency of the aqueous part 

 of the globe, and to the uses to which a knowledge 

 of it has been applied; we have an equal illus- 

 tration of the natural powers of the human mind, 

 and of the necessities to which man was sub^ 

 jected, in order that they should be called forth 

 into useful activity. For water is not his natural 

 element; and all animals, taken in their simple 

 attributes (of which uninformed man may be 



