56 CLINTON S INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSE. 



lately printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society; and we have 

 many and considerable collections of words in different Indian lan- 

 guages. Our antiquities are of two kinds, such as relate to the abo- 

 riginal, and colonial states. We have no Indian monuments or curiosi- 

 ties that can be compared with the forts on the Ohio, or with the 

 temples of the Aztecs. There are some remains of Indian pottery, of 

 weapons, and of rude paintings. Mounds of earth, like the tumuli, in 

 Scandinavia, Russia, and Tartary, the barrows in England, and the 

 cairns in Scotland and Ireland, may still be seen, and also the outlines 

 of extensive fortifications. But the variegated condition of the white 

 man here exhibits human nature in all its shapes : we behold him in 

 every stage of society from the semi savage hunter to a polished citizen; 

 and we perceive every stage of cultivation from the first tree that was 

 cut to the elegant habitation. " In North America," says a distin- 

 guished writer, " a traveller who sets out from a great town, where the 

 social state has attained to perfection, traverses successively all degrees 

 of civilization and industry, which keep diminishing till he arrives in a 

 few days at the rude and unseemly hut formed of the trunks of trees 

 newly cut down. Such a journey is a sort of practical analysis of the 

 origin of nations and states. We set out from the most complicated 

 union to arrive at the most simple elements. We travel in retrogres- 

 sion the history of the progress of the human mind, and we find in 

 space what is due only to the succession of time."* 



Zoology has been greatly neglected. Linnaeus has distributed animals 

 into six classes, and has arranged the mammalia (consisting of viviparous 

 animals which suckle their offspring) into seven orders, according to 



* Tallejrand on Colonization. 



