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tribes of men. A few observations on this opinion calculated to demonstrate its utter improbability, if not its obvious falsehood, will not, I presume, be deemed impertinent to the object of the following essay ; which is to confirm the doctrine of the unity of the human race, by pointing out the causes of its variety.  As this argument, however, rests on an entirely different kind of proof, and is only incidentally related to my principal design, I shall present it to the reader with the greatest brevity.  And I trust it will not be found to be an argument so trite, or so unimportant, as to render it, on either account, unworthy his serious attention. 

The original, and absolute savagism of mankind, then, is a principle which appears to me to be contradicted equally by sound reason, and by the most authentic documents which remain to us of ancient history.*  All the earliest monuments of nations, as far as we can trace them, fix their origin about the middle regions of Asia, and present man to us in a 

* The argument from history will be found handsomely illustrated by Mr. David Doig of Sterling in Scotland, in three letters addressed to Lord Kaims, and published in one duodecimo volume.


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state already civilized.  From this centre we perceive the radiations of the race gradually shooting themselves towards every quarter of the globe.  Savage life seems to have arisen only from idle, or restless spirits, who, shunning the fatigues of labor, or spurning the restraints and subordinations of civil society, sought, at once, liberty, and the pleasures of the chace, in wild, uncultivated regions remote from their original habitations.  Here, forgetting the arts of civilized life, they, with their posterity, degenerated, in a course of time, into all the ignorance and rudeness of savagism, and furnished ample materials to the imagination of the poets for the pictures they have presented to us of the abject condition of the primitive men.  But let us consult reason, as well as history, for the truth, or probability of their pictures. 

Hardly is it possible that man, placed on the surface of the new world, in the midst of its forests and marshes, capable of reason, indeed, but without having formed principles to direct its exercise, should have been able to preserve his existence, unless he had received from his Creator, along with his being, some instructions concerning the use and employment of his faculties, for procuring his subsistence, and inventing 

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