parent stock. Could it so have happened that all further com- 

 munication with the Old World had ceased, the deterioration 

 which had commenced would unquestionably have proceeded 

 still further : but this process has been checked by the conti- 

 nual arrivals of fresh settlers from the mother country and the 

 constant communications between the two continents, which 

 have in a great measure maintained an equality between their 

 respective inhabitants. But let it be supposed that these 

 European settlers in America had been the only remains of a 

 former race of mankind : it is evident that, whatever in the 

 course of ages might be the character and condition of their 

 descendants, — even if some of them, in the extreme western pro- 

 vinces of America or in other countries into which they might 

 have spread, had become so debased and brutalized as not to be 

 recognized as belonging to the same race ; — still, in the con- 

 sideration of their history, and in the endeavour to trace to their 

 pristine state their laws, their customs, and their religion, how- 

 ever altered, however perverted or corrupted they might become, 

 it would be utterly inconsistent that reference should (in the 

 first instance at least) be made to any other stock than the Euro- 

 pean colonists from whom they had sprung, or to any other con- 

 dition of society than that previous artificial one of which those 

 Europeans themselves had been members. 



May not, then, the history of the whole human race be con- 

 sidered in a similar point of view to that in which the history of 

 the American colonists has thus hypothetically been regarded ? 

 If we look to the histories, traditions, and fables of all nations, 

 we find that they all coincide in expressly recording or in al- 

 luding to a cataclysm, — the particulars of which are the most 

 fully and circumstantially detailed in the Sacred Writings of the 

 Israelitish nation, — which overwhelmed the whole of mankind, 

 with the exception of a few favoured individuals, who became 

 the founders of the subsequent human race : and if, therefore, 

 we only admit the fact of the occurrence of such an event, we 

 can at once understand how the condition of the first ancestors 

 of the present race of mankind was not a natural but an artificial 

 one, derived from the previous social state of the antediluvian 

 world. Hence we can have no difficulty in conceiving how the 



