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availed him little in that emergency.  It would have required, in order to its exercise, a knowledge of principles, and the of the nature of the objects around him, which could have been the result only of time, and a certain degree of experience.  In the meantime, that recent mass of organized matter, called a man, would probably have perished.*

*If it be asked how these few wild men, who, at different times, have been found in the forests of Europe have preserved themselves, if, as has been conjectured, they were exposed in infancy?-I believe rather that they have been list in the forests after the period of infancy and childhood, and when they had already acquired some knowledge of the manner of gathering certain fruits, and, perhaps, of taking by art the smaller species of game.  The youth, who, not long since, was found in a wood in France, appeared, by a scar which he had upon his person, to have been one of those victims who escaped the knife of the fanatical revolutionists, while probably his parents were murdered, or were obliged to leave him in their flight,  However this may be, he, and all the others who have been found in similar situations, have been so affected, probably with terror when they found themselves abandoned, that they seem to have been bereft of a great portion of the native powers of intellect, and rendered incapable of the ordinary exercises of reason.  They resembled brutes more than men.  Attentive only to the calls of hunger, and the objects with which they were accustomed to satisfy that appetite, they seemed to be capable of no other ideas.  They could not be made to understand the advantages, nor relish the habits of civilized life.  And whenever they could escape from their keepers, were ready, like the wildest animals,

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But, if we believe that, in this deplorable condition, he could have found means to sustain life, man, originally a savage, and a savage in the most abject state in which it is possible for human nature to exist, must have remained a savage for ever.  Urged by the most pressing wants of nature, for which all his exertions, undirected by skill, and unassisted by the natural arms which other creatures possess, could have furnished by a scanty supply, and which, therefore would have never ceased one moment to harass him, he would not have enjoyed leisure to invent any of those arts which enter into the first elements of civilized life.  An importunate appetite, with brutal impulse, would have so continually precipitated him from object to object in order to gratify its cravings, that the could have   redeemed no portion of his time for contemplating the powers of nature, or for combining his observations in such a manner as to apply those powers in ingenious inventions, for anticipating 

to dart into the forests again.  These miserable beings, and not a modern savage who has derived a few arts from his ancestors, and they, at some remote period, from a more civilized people, are the proper types of the primitive man thrown like a helpless and abandoned infant from the hand of his Creator, upon the wild and desolate surface of the new world.

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