286 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



posed to severity where he has power ; to a victim or a captive 

 inflicting needless torture, less from natural ferocity, than from 

 the want of individual self-reliance, which ia thus prone to 

 express fear by precaution. More readily reduced to order 

 when subdued, he evades rather than resists oppression by 

 force; he is more obstinate than brave, but savage to self- 

 destruction when roused by despair ; avoiding personal 

 tion, such as to walk or to dig unremittingly in the fields, be 

 rides in every region when the Horse is accessible; more imita- 

 tive than inventive, he exerts his ingenuity to apply mechani- 

 cal aids in necessary labors. Sitting at work, he is dexterous, 

 but little tasteful ; at handicraft professions, preferring pati<nt 

 elaboration to exertion; lazy, yet gluttonous, omnivorous with 

 scarcely any distinction; filthy, amounting to a dread of 

 water; crafty, dishonest, plausible; in war he trusts to his 

 horse, or to numbers; he finds sudden irruption, cruelty, plun- 

 der, and desolation, more congenial than open battle and 

 victory. 



With the mind more vacant than contemplative, the relig- 

 ious sentiment, that source of all exalted and practical feeling, 

 has never risen above an indistinct idea of a Supreme Being, 

 a heaven, or a solar worship; it is better satisfied with the true 

 northern impostures of Shamanism, and with the borrowed 

 demon worship engrafted on Budhistic doctrines; for what is 

 of true moral tendency, either in the ethics of Foh or Budh, is 

 of foreign origin, and repugnant to the intellectual puerilities 

 which are his substitutes for reason, philosophy, and science. 

 ;\ deified, ancestral, and paternal obedience stands in lieu 

 cf practical religion — his only support of that innate moral 

 feeling belonging to all human beings. It is the key-stone of 

 absolute power in the state; hence coercion is the civilization 

 of the masses, ceremonious punctiliousness that of their supe- 

 riors, ignorant self-laudation the acquirement of literati, and 

 insolence the portion of all. The discoveries they possess in 

 physics are the results of chance ; all the maxims of state are 



