130 
could have learned to supply his most immediate and urgent 
wants. . . . Hardly is it possible,” he adds, “ that man, 
placed on the surface of the world, in the midst of its forests 
and marshes, capable of reason, indeed, but without having 
formed principles to direct its exercise, should have been able 
to preserve his existence, unless he had received from his 
Creator, along with his being, some instructions concerning 
the employment of his faculties for procuring his subsistence, 
and inventing the most necessary arts of life.’’* 
Sir John Lubbock tries to rebut the almost universal evi- 
‘dence of degradation and to discredit the legends of a golden 
age by asserting. that all cases of national deterioration are due 
to exceptional causes. 
This deserves an answer. Now, we ask, Is it not the case 
that the earliest skulls of primitive man are by no means the 
most degraded or wanting in brain power?+ We have 
already produced evidence to this effect. 
Layard says that ‘in Assyria, as in Egypt, the arts do not 
appear to have advanced after the construction of the earhest 
edifices with which we are acquainted, but rather to have de- 
clined. The most ancient sculptures we possess are the most 
correct and severe in form, and show the highest degree of 
taste in the details ”’;{ and a writer on Heypt says: “‘ The more 
remote the antiquity of the records which have been preserved 
to us, the greater is the skill, the power, the knowledge, and 
the taste which they reveal.” 
The researches of Mr. Geo. Smith, Sir G. Rawlinson, Mr. 
Rassam, Mr. Chas. Boscawen, and of the Egyptologists, prove 
the same thing. 
Even the sites of Babylon, Nineveh, and Thebes, and 
many other great cities of antiquity are to-day utterly deso- 
late or inhabited by mere savages; while China and India, 
which appear to have received the main body of emigrants 
from the plains of Mesopotamia, are gradually but surely 
losing their aboriginal culture, or remaining at best station- 
ary; but the nations of the West, aided by Christianity, are 
vastly surpassing those whose ancestors were sages and 
philosophers when the Britons and Gauls were painted 
savages. 
M. Hue, the Jesuit missionary, in his work on The Chinese 
* Quoted by Dr. Whately, p. 22. 
+ We find little trace of the time “when wild in woods the noble savage 
ran.” 
{ Layard’s Nineveh, vol. ii. p. 157. 
