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attention. During the infancy stage the bountiful hand of 

 nature, like a tender mother, supplied all the immediate wants 

 of mankind, without care, eifort, or thought on the part of man, 

 but primitive man soon discovered that this felicity was not to 

 last, and that he was born to a heritage of labour and strife. 

 One of the first practical lessons acquired was a consciousness 

 of the limitation of his knowledge and the deficiency of his 

 experience, and, like a precocious youth, his expanding mind 

 devoted itself to observation and inquiry. 



We naturalists can fully understand what a powerful effect the 

 objects of nature must have had upon the expanding mind of 

 primitive man. The various forms of animals life that shared 

 his companionship, the verdure of the vegetable world that 

 beautified the landscape, "the seasons ever rolling round 

 minutely faithful," the voice of the thunder, and the roar of the 

 cataract, we can well understand how all this must have 

 impressed primitive man in the dawn of his youthful intelli- 

 gence. Then, everything was so strange, so wonderful, and, to 

 his childlike fancy, apparently the work of beings, superior to 

 himself, whose personality he but vainly imagined, and whose 

 power, so far beyond his own, he feared and worshipped. Hence 

 all nature was to him tenanted by living beings, each in their 

 allotted sphere working out the ever-changing phenomena 

 around him, and producing the results for good or evil that 

 most affected his destiny. In this recognition of cause and 

 effect we have the fundamental basis of all scientific research, 

 and in the conception that the moving cause was a being active 

 and capable we have the goal of all true worship. The methods 

 employed in the investigation of the cause or causes of natural 

 phenomena were extremely varied, and the paths pursued 

 towards the goal of religious truth were extremely tortuous, and 

 in the development of human culture both were influenced, 

 modified, and readapted under the varying circumstances of 

 time, the migration and co-mingling of tribes, the dispersion of 

 the human family over the earth, the growth of natural 

 characteristics and the formation of settled communities ; and, 



