48 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. — 1907. 
ling’s adjutant crane, and the mad antics with which that otherwise 
dignified bird interspersed his solemn discourses. 
Man’s first step in the progress toward civilization was to learn the 
rise of his own body; "And,” to quote again, “he must have begun by 
erecting himself, without which he could not have had the advantage 
of the length of his body for attack or defense, or for the practice of 
the several arts of life. Besides, it gave him the os sublime — enabled 
him to look at his native seat, the Heavens — and gave that dignity to 
his appearance which was suitable to an animal that was destined to 
govern on this earth.” (IY, p. 35.) The use of the hands followed 
this, and then the art of swimming. Monboddo considers these to be 
acquired, and not instinctive, habits, because children learn them with 
such difficulty, and because of certain examples of .men in this “second 
stage of the natural state,” as he calls it, who lacked some or all of these 
abilities; he names, among others, the orang-outang, and “Peter, the 
Wild Boy.” This youth was captured when about thirteen years old 
in the woods of Hamelin, in Germany; he was entirely ignorant of the 
habits of his species, not having learned even to walk erect; under tutor- 
ship he attained a fair degree of under standing, although not to more 
than three words of articulate speech. Monboddo terms this experience 
“a brief chronicle or abstract of the history of human nature from the 
mere animal to the first stage of civilized life.” Man, at this point in 
his development, added hunting and fishing to his methods of procuring 
food, the animal diet tending to make him fierce and warlike, instead 
of gentle, tractable and friendly, as he is by nature. 
Further progression came with the habit of herding together, like 
the beavers, in order to carry on “some work jointly for the behoof of 
the whole herd.” For successful communal efforts, language was neces- 
sary; but Monboddo balks at the idea of its gradual development, be- 
cause he thinks it was “not possible that man, without some super- 
natural assistance, could have invented an art, of which even the prac- 
tice, after it is invented, is very difficult to be learned, and can hardly 
be learned at all, except in our earliest and most docible years.” (IY, 
p. 41.) But the art became established, through, presumably, divine 
aid; a fixed habitation, and agriculture as the chief means of subsis- 
tence, were adopted; and then followed man’s “invention and cultiva- 
tion of the arts and sciences, by which only he can make any progress 
in this life, toward regaining the state from which he has fallen.” 
Coincident with this material progress was the mental development, 
which took place both racially and individually, according to the fol- 
lowing outline: Monboddo begins with Aristotle’s definition of man 
as “a comparative Animal (that is, an animal who has the faculty of 
Comparing), who has also the capacity of acquiring Intellect and Sci- 
