﻿30 THE FIFTH DISCOURSE: 



language of the Brahmans affords, of an immemorial 

 and total difference between the Savages of the Moun- 

 tains > as the old Chinese justly called the Tartars, and 

 the studious, placid, contemplative inhabitants of 

 these Indian plains. 



II. The geographical reasoning ofM.Bailly may, 

 perhaps, be thought equally shallow, if not inconsist- 

 ent in some dtpree with itself. ' An adoration of the 



* sun and of fire,' sa) s he, £ must necessarily have 



* arisen in a cold region ; therefore it must have been 

 6 foreign to India, Persia, Arabia ; therefore it must 

 4 have beep derived from Tariary? No man, I be- 

 lieve, who has travelled in winter through Bahar, or 

 has even passed a cold season at Calcutta within the 

 tropic, can doubt that the solar warmth is often de- 

 sirable by all, and might have been considered as ado- 

 rable by the ignorant in these climates ; or that the 

 return of spring deserves all the salutations which it 

 receives from the Persian and Indian poets ; not to 

 rely on certain historical evidence, that Antarah, a 

 celebrated warrior and bard, actually perished with 

 cold on a mountain of Arabia. To meet, however, 

 an objection which might naturally enough be made 

 to the voluntary settlement and amazing population 

 of his primitive race, in the icy regions of the north, 

 he takes refuge in the hypothesis ofM.Bujfon, who ima- 

 gines that our whole globe was at first of a white heat, 

 and has been gradually cooling from the poles to the 

 equator; so that the Hyperborean countries had once 

 a delightful temperature ; and Siberia itself was even 

 hotter than the climate of our temperate zones', that is, 

 was in too hot a climate, by his first proposition, for 

 die primary worship of the sun. That the tempera- 

 ture of countries has not sustained a change in the 

 lapse of ages, I will by no means insist ; but we can 

 hardly reason conclusively from a variation of tempe- 

 rature to the cultivation and diffusion of science. If as 

 rnanv female elephants and tigresses -as we now find in 



