164 



EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 



fiew language. I have seen children in other ircum. 

 stances amuse themselves by concocting and throwing 

 into the family circulation entirely new words ; and I be- 

 lieve I am running little risk of contradiction when I say 

 that there is scarcely a family even amongst the middle 

 classes of this country who have not some peculiarities of 

 pronunciation and syntax, which have originated amongst 

 themselves, it is hardly possible to say how. All these 

 things being considered, it is easy to understand how 

 mankind have come at length to possess between three and 

 four thousand languages, all different, at least as much as 

 French, German, and English, though, as has been shown, 

 the traces of a common origin are observable in them all. 



What has been said on the question whether mankind 

 were originally barbarous or civilized, will have prepa- 

 red the reader for understanding how the arts and scien- 

 ces, and the rudiments of civilization itself, took their 

 rise amongst men. The only # source of fallacious views 

 on this subject is the so frequent observation of arts, 

 sciences, and social modes, forms, and ideas, being not 

 indigenous where we see them now flourishing, but 

 known to have been derived elsewhere : thus Rome bor- 

 rowed from Greece, Greece from Egypt, and Egypt itself, 

 lost in the mists of historic antiquity, is now supposed to 

 have obtained the light of knowledge from some still 

 earlier scene of intellectual culture. This has caused to 

 many a great difficulty in supposing a natural or sponta- 

 neous origin for civilization and the attendant arts. But, 

 in the first place, several stages of derivation are no con- 

 clusive argument against there having been an originality 

 at some earlier stage. In the second, such observers 

 have not looked far enough, for, if they had, they could 

 have seen various instances of civilizations which it is 

 impossible, with any plausibility, to trace back to a com- 

 mon origin with others ; such are those of China and 

 America. They would also have seen civilization spring- 

 ing up, as it were, like oases amongst the arid plains of 

 barbarism, as in the case of the Mandans. A still more 

 attentive study of the subject would have shown, amongst 

 living men, the very psychological procedure on which 

 the origination of civilization and the arts and sciences 

 depended. 



These things, like language, are simply the effects of 

 the spontaneous working of certain mental faculties, each 



