NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 227, 



slioLild be numerous and closely placed ; that they should 

 be fixed in their habitations, and safe from violent ex- 

 ternal and internal disturbance; .that a considerable 

 number of them should be exempt from the necessity of 

 drudging for immediate subsistence. Feeling themselves 

 at ease about the first necessities of their nature, includ- 

 ing self-preservation, and daily subjected to that in- 

 tellectual excitement which society produces, men begin 

 to manifest what is called civilisation ; but never in rudo 

 and shelterless circumstances, or when widely scattered. 

 Even men who have been civilised, when transferred to 

 a wide wilderness, where each has to work hard and 

 isolatedly for the first requisites of life, soon show a 

 retrogression to barbarism : witness the plains of 

 Australia, as well as the backwoods of Canada and the 

 prairies of Texas. Fixity of residence and thickening of 

 population are perhaps the prime requisites for civilisa- 

 tion, and hence it will be found that all civilisations as 

 yet known have taken place in regions physically limited. 

 That of Egypt arose in a narrow valley hemmed in by 

 deserts on both sides. That of Greece took its rise in a 

 small peninsula bounded on the only land side by moun- 

 tains. Etruria and Kome were naturally limited regions. 

 Civilisations have taken place at both the eastern and 

 western extremities of the elder continent — China and 

 Japan, on the one hand ; Germany, Holland, Britain, 

 France, on the other — while the great unmarked tract 

 between contains nations decidedly less advanced. Why 

 is this, but because the sea, in both cases, has imposed 

 limits to farther migration, and caused the population to 

 settle and condense — the conditions most necessary for 

 social improvement."^ Even the simple case of the 



* The problem of Chinese civilization, such as it is — so puzzling 

 when wc consider that they arc only, as will be presently seen, the 



