ON THE VARIETIES 



Terra cibum puerjs,vestem vapor, herba cubile 

 Prajbebat, M)ulta et molli lanugiue abundans.* 



Earth fed the nursling, the warm ether clothed, 

 And the soft downy grass his couch composed. 



And frivolous as such a theory may appear in the present day, it was the 

 only one which was current among the Grecian or Roman philosophers^ 

 except that which supposed mankind to have been propagated by eternal 

 generation, and of course the universe, like himself, to be eternal and self- 

 existent : compared with which, an origin from the dust of the earth, even 

 after the manner of vegetables, is incomparably less monstrous and ab- 

 surd. 



Let us now pass on to the hypothesis of those modern philosophers 

 who would associate the tribes of man with the tribes of the monkey^ 

 and originate both from one common stock, in the same manner as the 

 ox and the buffalo are said to be derived from the bison, and the different 

 varieties of sheep from the argali. 



There are a few wonderful histories afloat of wild men and wild women 

 found in the woods of Germany and France ; some of which are said to 

 have been dumb, others to have the voice of sheep or oxen, and others 

 again to have walked on all-fours. And from these few floating tales, not 

 amounting, in modern times, to more than nine or ten, Linneus thought 

 proper to introduce the orang-otariginto the human family, and to regard 

 such instances of wild men as the connecting species between this animal 

 and mankind in a state of civilized society. Whence Lord Monboddo 

 has amused us with legends of men found in every variation of barbarism ; 

 in some instances even ungregariousor solitary ; in others, unitixig, indeed, 

 into small hordes, but so scanty even in natural or inarticulate language, 

 as to be obliged to assist tlieir own meaning by signs and gestures ; and, 

 consequently, to be incapable of conversing in the dark ; of a third sort, 

 who have in some degree improved upon their natural language, but have 

 still so much of the savage beast belonging to them, as to employ their 

 teeth and nails, which last are not less than an inch long, as weapons of 

 defence ; and of a fourth sort, found in an island of the Indian Seas, with 

 the full possession of speech, but v/ith tails like those of cats or monkeys ; 

 a set of dreadful cannibals, which at ono time killed and devoured every 

 Dutchman they could lay their hands upon. 



It is truly wonderful, that a scholar of Lord Monboddo's accomplish- 

 ments could have allowed himself to be for one moment imposed upon by 

 a mass of trash so absurd and extravagant as not to be worth the trouble 

 of confuting. Such romances are certainly in existence ; but they are 

 nothing more than the fabled news of a few low and illiterate mariners, 

 whose names were never sufficient to give them the slightest degree of 

 authority, even when they were first uttered ; and which, for the most part, 

 dropped successively into an obscure and ignominious grave at the moment 

 of their birth, and would have silently mouldered away into their elemental 

 nothingness, had not this very singular writer chosen to rake up their de- 

 composing atoms, in order to support an hypothesis which sufficiently 

 proves its own weakness by the scouted and extravagant evidence to which- 

 it is compelled to appeal. 



Of the wild men and wild women of Linneus, some appear to have 

 been idiots, escaped from their keepers ; a few, exaggerated accounts. 



Rer, Nat. r. 



