NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATIOX, 229 



golian type — that is, persons wlio in maturity still are a 

 kind of children. According to this view, the greater 

 part of the human race must be considei'ed as having 

 lapsed or declined from the original type. In the Cau- 

 casian or Indo-European family alone has the primitive 

 organisation been improved upon. The Mongolian, 

 Malay, American, and Negro, comprehending perhaps 

 five-sixths of mankind, are degenerate. Strange that the 

 great plan should admit of failures and aberrations of 

 such portentous magnitude ! But pause and reflect ; 

 take time into consideration : the past history of man- 

 kind may be, to what is to come, but as a day. Look at 

 the progress even now making over the barbaric parts of 

 the earth by the best examples of the Caucasian ty^^e, 

 promising not only to fill up the waste places, but to 

 supersede the imperfect nations already existing. Who 

 can tell what progress may be made, even in a single 

 century, towards reversing the proportions of the perfect 

 and imperfect types % and who can tell but that the time 

 during which the mean types have lasted, long as it 

 appears, may yet be thrown entirely into the shade by 

 the time during which the best types will remain j^re- 

 dominant % 



We have seen that the traces of a common origin in 

 all languages afibrd a ground of presumption for the 

 unity of the human race. They establish a still stronger 

 probability that mankind had not yet begun to disperse 

 before they were possessed of a means of communicating 

 their ideas by conventional sounds — in short, speech. 

 This is a gift so peculiar to man, and in itself so remark- 

 able, that there is a great inclination to surmise a mira- 

 culous origin for it, although there is no proper ground, 

 or even support, for such an idea in Scripture, while it 

 is clearly opposed to everything else that we know with 



