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one place we see him harbouring in caves, naked, living, we might almost say, on prey, seeking from chance his wretched sustenance, food which he eats just as he finds it. This extreme degradation is rare; perhaps nowhere are all these circumstances of destitution found together-but still they are found, fearfully admonishing us of our nature. Man has as yet done nothing for himself-his own hands have done nothing for him -he lives like a beggar on the alms of nature. Turn to another land, and you see the face of the earth covered with the works of his hand-his habitation, wide-spreading, stately cities -his clothing and the ornaments of his person culled and fashioned from the three kingdoms of nature. For his food, the face of the earth bears him tribute; and the seasons and changes of heaven concur with his own art in ministering to his board.

This is the difference which man has made in his own condition by the use of his intellectual powers, awakened and goaded on by the necessities of his physical constitution. He stands naked in the midst of nature, but armed with powers which will make him her sovereign lord. Want, Pain, and Death, howling in the forest, urge him on, and he rouses up the powers of his invincible mind to the contention with physical evil. It is not his hand alone that delivers him from this lot of affliction; but it is his mind working in that powerful organ. His first food is from nature's bounty; his next is from his own art. He sees that the seeds she casts into the ground spring up with another season. He casts them in, and waits for the season. He then, at her guidance, chooses the soil and prepares it; and thus his first step towards the conquest of nature, is to observe her own silent and mysterious operations.

The early history of the great primary arts of life, their origin, and the first steps of their progress, lie buried in the darkness of antiquity; but thus much we may understand, that man found himself in the midst of a world teeming with natural productions, and full of the operation of natural powers offering him benefit, or menacing him with destruction. The various knowledge, the endlessly multiplied arts, by which he fills

his life with the supplies of its great necessities, and with all its great re→ sources of security and power, or with which he adorns it, are all merely the regulated application of powers of nature acting at his dis cretion upon her own substances and productions. But the various know ledge, the endlessly multiplied ob servation, the experience and rea sonings of man added to man, of ges neration following generation, which were required to bring to a moderate state of advancement the great primary arts subservient to physical life,-the arts of providing food, ha bitation, clothing, and defence, to man, we are utterly unable to con ceive. We are born to the know. ledge, which was collected at first by the labours of many generations. How slowly with continual accessions of knowledge were those arts reared up which still remain to us! How many arts which had laboriously been brought to perfection, have been displaced by superior invention, and fallen into oblivion? Fenced in as we are by the works of our predecessors, we see but a small part of the power of man contending with the difficulties of his lot. But what a wonderful scene would be opened up before our eyes, with what intense interest should we look on, if we could indeed behold man armed only with his own implanted powers, and going forth to conquer the creation! If we could see him beginning by subduing evils, and supplying painful wants; going on to turn those evils and wants into the means of enjoyment-and at length, in the wantonness and pride of his power, filling his existence with luxuries! If we could see him from his first step, in the untamed though fruitful wilderness, advancing to subdue the soil, to tame and multiply the herds, -from bending the branches into a bower, to fell the forest and quarry the rock,-seizing into his own hands the element of fire, directing its action on substances got from the bowels of the earth,-fashioning wood, and stone, and metal, to the will of his thought,-searching the nature of plants to spin their fibres, or with their virtues to heal his disease ;-if we could see him raise his first cities, launch his first ship, calling the winds and waters to be his

servants, and to do his work,-changing the face of the earth,-forming lakes and rivers,-joining seas, or stretching the continent itself into the dominion of the sea;-if we could do all this in imagination, then should we understand something of what man's intellect has done for his physical life, and what the necessities of his physical life have done in forcing into action all the powers of his intelligence.

But there are still higher considerations arising from the influence of man's physical necessities on the destiny of the species. It is this subjugation of natural evil, and this created dominion of art, that prepares the earth to be the scene of his social existence. His hard conquest was not the end of his toil. He has conquered the kingdom in which he was to dwell in his state. That full unfolding of his moral powers to which he is called, was only possible in those states of society which are thus brought into being by his conflict with all his physical faculties against all the stubborn powers of the material universe; for out of the same conquest Wealth is created. In this progress, and by means thus brought into action, the orders and classes of society are divided; Property itself, the allotment of the earth, takes place, because it is the bosom of the earth that yields food. That great foundation of the stability of communities is thus connected with the same necessity; and in the same progress, and out of the same causes, arise the first great Laws by which society is held together in order. Thus that whole wonderful developement of the Moral Nature of man, in all those various forms which fill up the history of the race, in part arises out of, and is always intimately blended with, the labours to which he has been aroused by those first great necessities of his physical nature. But had the tendency to increase his numbers been out of all proportion to the means provided by nature and infinitely multipliable by art, for the subsistence of human beings, how could this magnificent march have moved on?

Hence we may understand on what ground the ancient nations revered so highly, and even deified the authors of the primary arts of life, They

considered not the supply of the animal wants merely; but they contemplated that mighty change in the condition of mankind to which these arts have given origin. It is on this ground that they had raised the character of human life, that Virgil assigns them their place in the dwellings of bliss, among devoted patriots and holy priests, among those whom song or prophecy had inspired, among those benefactors of men whose names were to live for ever in their memory, giving his own most beautiful expression to the common sentiment of mankind.

"Hic manus ob patriam pugnando vul

nera passi,

Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita mane bat,

Quique pii vates, et Phœbo digna locuti, Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo; Omnibus his niveâ cinguntur tempora vittâ."

True, that in savage life men starve. But is that any proof that nature has cursed the race with a fatal tendency to multiply beyond the means of subsistence? None whatever. Attend for a little to this point. Of the real power of the bodily appetites for food, and the sway they may attain over the moral nature of the mind, we, who are protected by our place among the arrangements of civil society from greatly suffering under it, can, indeed, form no adequate conception. Let us not now speak of those dreadful enormities which, in the midst of dismal famine, are recorded to have been perpetrated by civilized men, when the whole moral soul, with all its strongest affections and instinctive abhorrences, has sunk prostrate under the force of that animal suffering. But the power of which we speak, as attained by this animal feeling, subsists habitually among whole tribes and nations. It is that power which it acquires over the mind of the savage, who is frequently exposed to suffer its severity, and who hunts for himself the food with which he is to appease it. Compare the mind of the human being as you are accustomed to behold him, knowing the return of this sensation only as a grateful incitement to take the ready nourishment which is spread for his repast, with that of his fellow-man, bearing through the

lonely woods the gnawing pang that goads him to his prey. Hunger is in his heart; hunger bears along his unfatiguing feet; hunger lies in the strength of his arm; hunger watches in his eye; hunger listens in his ear; as he couches down in his covert, silently waiting the approach of his expected spoil, this is the sole thought that fills his aching mind"I shall satisfy my hunger!" When his deadly aim has brought his victim to the ground, this is the thought that springs up as he rushes to seize it, "I have got food for my hungry soul!" What must be the usurpation of animal nature here over the whole man! It is not merely the simple pain, as if it were the forlornness of a human creature bearing about his famishing existence in helplessness and despair-though that, too, is indeed a true picture of some states of our race;-but here he is not a suffering and sinking wretch-he is a strong hunter, and puts forth his strength fiercely under the urgency of this pain. All his might in the chase,all pride of speed, and strength, and skill-all thoughts of long and hard endurance-all images of perils past-all remembrances and all foresight-are gathered on that one strong and keen desire-are bound down to the sense of that one bitter animal want. These feelings recurring day by day in the sole toil of his life, bring upon his soul a vehemence and power of desire in this object, of which we can have no conception, till he becomes subjected to hunger as a mighty animal passiona passion such as it rages in those fierce animal kinds which it drives with such ferocity on their prey. He knows hunger as the wolf knows it -he goes forth with his burning heart, like the tiger to lap blood. But turn to man in another condition to which he has been brought by the very agency of his physical on his intellectual and moral being! How far removed is he now from that daily contention with such evils as these! How much does he feel himself assured against them by belonging to the great confederacy of social life! How much is it veiled from his eyes by the many artificial circumstances in which the satisfaction of the want is involved. The work in which he labours the whole day

VOL. XXVIII. NO. CLXVIII.

on which his eyes are fixed and his hands toil-is something altogether unconnected with his own wants-connected with distant wants and purposes of a thousand other men in which he has no participation. And as far as it is a work of skill, he has to fix his mind on objects and purposes so totally removed from himself, that they all tend still more to sever his thoughts from. his own necessities; and thus it is that civilization raises his moral character, when it protects almost every. human being in a country from that subjection to this passion, to which even noble tribes are bound down in the wildernesses of nature.

Yet it is the most melancholy part of all the speculation that is suggested by the condition of men, to observe what a wide gloom is cast over their souls by this severe necessity, which is nevertheless the great and constant course of the improvement of their condition. It is not suffering alone-for that they may be in-, ured to bear, but the darkness of the understanding, and the darkness of the heart, which comes on under the oppression of toil, that is miserable to see.

Our fellow-men, born, with the same spirits as ourselves, seem yet denied the common privi-, leges of that spirit. They seem to bring faculties into the world that cannot be unfolded, and powers of affection and desire, which, not their fault, but the lot of their birth, will pervert and degrade. There is an humiliation laid upon our nature in the doom which seems thus to rest upon a great portion of our species, which, while it requires our most considerate compassion for those who are thus depressed, compels us to humble ourselves under the sense of our own participation in the nature from which it flows. Therefore, in estimating the worth, the virtue of our fellow men, whom Providence has placed in a lot that, yields to them the means, and little, more than the means, of supporting life in themselves and those born of them, let us never forget how intimate is the necessary union between the wants of the body and the thoughts of the soul. Let us remember, that over a great proportion of all humanity, the soul is in a struggle for its independence and

I

power with the necessities of that nature in which it is enveloped. It has to support itself against sickening, or irritating, or maddening thoughts, inspired by weariness, lassitude, want, or the fear of want. It is chained down to the earth by the influence of one great and constant occupation-that of providing the means of its mortal existence. When it shews itself shook and agitated, or overcome in the struggle, what ought to be the thoughts and feelings in the considerate soul of wisdom for poor humanity? When, on the other hand, we see nature preserving itself pure, bold, and happy amidst the perpetual threatenings or assaults of those evils from which it cannot fly, and, though oppressed by its own weary wants, forgetting them all in that love which ministers to the wants of others-when we see the brow wrinkled and drenched by incessant toil, the body, in the power of its prime, bowed down to the dust, and the whole frame in which the immortal spirit abides marked, but not dishonoured, by its slavery to fate; and when, in the midst of all this ceaseless depression and oppression, from which man must never hope to escape on earth, we see him still seeking and still finding joy, delight, and happiness in the finer affections and loves and desires of his spiritual being, giving to the lips of those he loves the scanty morsel earned by his own hungry and thirsty toil, purchasing by sweat, sickness, and fever, Education and Instruction and Religion to the young creatures who delight the soul of him who is starving for their sakes, resting with gratitude on that day, whose return is ever like a fresh fountain to his exhausted and weary heart, and preserving a profound and high sense of his own immortality among all the earth-born toils and troubles that would in vain chain him down to the dust,-when we see all this, and think of all this, we feel indeed how rich may be the poorest of the poor, and learn to respect the moral being of man in its triumphs over the power of his physical nature. But we do not learn to doubt or deny the wisdom of the Creator. We do not learn from all these struggles, and all these defeats, and all these victories, and all these triumphs, that God sent

us his creatures into this life to starve, for that the air, the earth, and the waters have not wherewith to feed the mouths that gape for food through all the elements! Nor do we learn that want is a crime, and poverty a sin-and that they who would toil, but cannot, and they who can toil, but have no work set before them, are intruders at Nature's table, and must be driven by those who are able to pay for their seats to famine, starvation, and death-almost denied a burial!

But to return to Mr Sadler from the episode into which we have been led away from the main action of his argument. He goes on to expatiate, not only on the command given to man over "edible nature," but along with it the wonderful faculty of increasing the productiveness of any part thereof which may be most suitable or agreeable to him.

Dio

"Take a single example, and let that be the most important one;-wheat. dorus Siculus informs us, this is indigenous in Sicily, his native country. There is still said to be in that island a species compared with the cultivated, what wild of wild wheat, but which is, perhaps, oats (with which most of us are familiar) are, compared with our present samples of that grain-barren and unproductive; but let this wheat be duly cultivated in a soil prepared by human industry, and we are informed by Pliny it has been known to yield from 300 to 400 grains for 1; and Herodotus assures us, on his own authority as an eye-witness, that from 200 to 300 was the regular return in Babylonia. Perhaps these ancients may be doubted; not, however, by those who are acquainted with the creative powers of human industry. Du Hamel informs us that he has seen barley produce 4800 fold: and, to return to the former plant, wheat, a scientific countryman of our own, Miller-a name well known in the annals of culture-performed an experiment in the botanical garden of Cambridge, of which he was curator, by which a single grain of red wheat returned 22,109 ears, and sion of the root one step further, which, 566,800 grains. Had he carried his divihe says, other experiments convinced him was fully practicable, he should have ob.. tained ten times the quantity from the same single grain; namely, between five and six million-fold increase. This is recorded in the Transactions of the Royal Society for 1768, and verified by Dr Wat son,"

He then speaks of the faculty man has above all other animals of sustaining life, with the least inconvenience, in the widest range of climate, and of that provision of nature by which such faculty is rendered of avail, namely, that those productions, whether vegetable or animal, on which he chiefly depends for subsistence, are endued with a capability of enduring a similar change. Thus, for example, Von Buch found the business of pasturage advantageously pursued, and even grain healthy and prolific, and succeeding admirably, some degrees within the arctic circle, on the verge of the 70th degree of northern latitude. As the climate varies, so does the necessity of clothing; nature, says he, still wears his livery wherever he moves. In the hot climates, silk and cotton are presented to him; in the temperate ones, these yield to the finer wools; which, as the latitude northerns, become thicker and more plentiful, till, in the frozen regions, fur, much the warmest of all coverings, is produced in abundance.

"Should it be attempted to evade the force of this argument, by attributing all these changes to the operation of physical causes, what shall be said of a more irresistible proof of the same cheering truth -the plain intention of Nature, to support in comfort human beings in every climate, namely, that when she can vary the different tribes of creation no further, without destroying their character, then, for his sake, she creates new ones, so obviously adapted to his local necessities, that he could not continue to exist with out them? Take two examples, and two only; one from each of those parts of the globe which are justly conceived to be the least friendly to human life, and consequently the most needing such extraordinary aids; the first, from the torrid zone, and let the camel be the instance. This singular animal, in the first place, has, of course, to be adapted to the peculiarities of the climate, in order to its own existence; and this is strikingly the case. In a region where there is little vegetation, and less moisture, Nature has constructed its muscular frame on the most spare and economical principles; on such, therefore, as demand the smallest supplies: hence, it requires little food, which, to make the most of, it ruminates; it must consume that food hard and dry; it has, consequently, great muscular force in the jaw.

Above all, it is probably beyond any other quadruped in creation patient of continued thirst; a quality which, in such a region, seems to reverse the very nature of things; and yet, without this one singular provision, all the rest would have been of no avail, in so parched and weary a

The

land as it has to inhabit. Other anatomical adaptations might be pointed out, but lined with a lump of flesh, which would, I shall merely mention its hoof; this is in great measure, prevent its utility in the hard and mountainous district of Europe; but which is plainly adapted to the dry, sandy, and level soil it has to traverse. But all these peculiarities, so necessary to its own being, subserve that of man. flesh is acceptable; the milk nutritious; while the patience and gentleness with which Nature has endued it, have rendered it the obedient slave of the human species. In short, to use the words of an author not generally accused of enthu siasm, Volney, So great is the importance of the camel to the desert, that were it deprived of that useful animal, it must infallibly lose every inhabitant.'

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"Look next at the frigid zone, in its more remote recesses, where Nature seems to be so sparing in all that is necessary to life, and so profuse in what is deemed hostile to it; where the cattle, accounted essential to our comfort, if not to our existence, could not, generally speaking, either live or be fed through the long and rigorous winter which is there experienced, and which, if they could be preserved during that period, would not answer the necessary purposes to which we apply them. Is, then, the Laplander deserted by Providence? On the contrary, it has presented, exclusively, to him one of the noblest animals in existence; and in its formation, has so economised the scanty means of nature, as to unite at once the valuable properties of almost every other --and all adapted, specially, to the peculiar station it has to occupy. I need not say I allude to the rein-deer, a quadruped which comprises every thing he wants, either for life, convenience, or luxury. Its milk rivals that of the cow; its flesh that of our deer; its fleetness and docility those of the horse; and he that placed him there, so contrived that part of the frame which I have alluded to in the other instance, that the hoof of this wonderful and interesting animal should, contrary to its own genus elsewhere, spread out, and become, literally speaking, a snow-shoe; so that it can convey its owner over that mantle of snow which covers, for so long a portion of the year, rocks and valleys, woods and plains, lakes and streams,--with an incre

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