150 SUPPLEMENTAL HISTORY OF MAN. 



specific difference between animals and man, to which 

 we have already alluded, but on which we shall 

 here add a few words, is the prodigious, the almost 

 illimitable capacity of improvement in the latter. 

 Animals never improve, at least, as species. They 

 perform the same work in the same manner, and in 

 operations peculiar to themselves we discover no 

 gradations of individual excellence or inferiority. 

 Each individual generally remains to the period of 

 his existence, stationary at that degree of advance- 

 ment at which he arrived in the course of a few 

 months. The lapse of ages has made no improve- 

 ment in the condition of the species. Animals have 

 no traditionary knowledge, nor can they like man, 

 hoard up the accumulated experience of generations, 

 and bequeath it as a deposit for the use of posterity. 

 Nature has imposed upon them her most imperious 

 •command — " Thus far shall ye go, and no farther." 

 But it is not so with man. Regard him in the 

 origin of society; weak, naked, and defenceless. 

 Nature has clad in defensive mail the armed rhi- 

 noceros, provided the lion and the tiger with the 

 weapons of offence, clothed' the sheep in woo], and 

 the bear in fur. Every animal she has bountifully 

 provided with all that was necessary for its sub- 

 sistence and adapted to its destined mode of exist- 

 ence. Man alone she abandoned, unarmed in the 

 midst of dangers, uncovered to the winds of heaven. 

 But she had, nevertheless, bestowed upon him one 

 gift much more than equivalent to all that was 

 denied. She endowed him with inventive genius, 



