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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2013
It is a general belief that Man, in his supposed progress from Savage to Civilized Life, has passed through three distinct stages or periods, each one leading a step forward in the road to social improvement. These stages are asserted to be, 1. The Hunter State; 2. The Pastoral State; and, 3. The Agricultural State. Allusions to these different stages crowd the pages of the historian, the philosopher, and the poet; and arguments are founded on, and deductions drawn from, these states of existence, as if they were ultimate truths, neither to be discussed nor dissented from. It is the object of this paper to question the existence of these separate states, their necessary connection with one another, and the end to which ultimately they are supposed to lead.
page 177 note * Works and Days, Book I. translated from the Greek by Thomas Cooke.
page 177 note † Carus, T. Lucretius, De Natura Rerum, lib. v.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 178 note * Metamorph. lib. i.
page 178 note † Sat. iii. v. 199, &c.
page 178 note ‡ Sketches of the History of Man, i. 46, 47.
page 178 note ∥ The traditions of the Chinese, separated as they are, in many respects, from every other people, correspond, according to Dr Thomas Young, with the classical theory of man's savage original and progressive civilization. Dr Young himself, like most other philosophers, takes the truth of the theory for granted. Supp. Encyclop. Brit. Art. China.
page 178 note ** Nouv. Dict, de l'Histoire Naturelle, tome xv. Art. L'Homme.
page 178 note § Consolations in Travel, p. 76.
page 179 note * For the knowledge and perusal of this scarce and, I believe, little known book, I am indebted to the kindness of John Gordon, Esq. of Cairnbulg. The first Letter is dated 20th December 1774, the second March 12. 1775; but they were not published till 1792. The title of the volume is, “Two Letters on the Savage State, addressed to the late Lord Kaims.” The advertisement, detailing the author's purpose in writing and afterwards publishing them, is written by the Rev. Mr Gleig, afterwards a bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church.
page 181 note * Taylor's Natural History of Society, i. 19.
page 181 note † Origin and Progress of Language, i. 272.
page 181 note ‡ Diet. Classique de l‘Hist. Nat. Art. L'Homme.
page 182 note * Buffon, par Sonnini, XX. 51.
page 182 note † Sacred History of the World, ii. 253, 293.
page 182 note ‡ Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 7. By Adam Ferguson, LL.D. Lond. 1793.
page 182 note § Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher, p. 76. In this little work, though Sir Humphry makes one of the speakers in his Second Dialogue question the classical theory of man's savage origin, yet this is so feebly done as to imply the author's want of confidence in the position his opponent is made to assume; and even the appeal to the first book of Moses is modified by passages, in which the author shews his leaning to the doctrine of savage original and progressive advancement. In the Vision which is the base of the first two dialogues, the human race are described as advancing through all the classical periods, from the mute savage of Horace up to the pastoral and agricultural life. But Sir Humphry fails to shew how his supposed instincts could ever lead man to sow or reap, or tame animals, and none of the speakers in the dialogue explain how man, created savage, could ever have risen above that condition. Afterwards, however, he makes another speaker concede that man was created, not a savage (as formerly represented), but perfect in his faculties, and with a variety of instinctive powers and knowledge, and that he transmitted these powers and knowledge to his offspring. (P. 100.)
page 183 note * Philosophie Zoologique, tome i. p. 255.
page 183 note † According to Lamarck, the dominant race, or man, having multiplied their wants as society became more numerous, felt the necessity of communicating their ideas to their companions. The result was, to augment and vary the signs proper for the communication of these ideas; and pantomimic signs, and all possible inflections of the voice, having failed to keep pace with the multitude of acquired ideas, they came at last, by redoubled efforts, to form articulate sounds. From thence the origin of the admirable faculty of speech. (Philosophie Zoologique, tom. i. 356, 357.)
page 184 note * A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages, appended to the second volume of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, seventh edition, Lond. 1792, vol. ii. pp. 402, 404.Google Scholar
page 184 note † Inquiry into the Human Mind, chap. iv. sect 2.
page 184 note ‡ Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, iii. 2, 3.
page 184 note § Ibid. vol. iii. p. 25.
page 184 note ∥ An Essay on the History of Civil Society. By Ferguson, Adam, LL.D.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 184 note ¶ Elements, iii. 26.
page 185 note * Lord Monboddo sets out with the proposition, that articulation is altogether the work of art or habit, and that ages must have elapsed before language was invented. Origin and Progress of Language, i. 71.
The result of an experiment made by one of our kings (James IV.), and recorded by Lindsay of Pitscottie, of sending two children under the care of a dumb woman, to be reared on the island of Inchkeith till they came of age, is not mentioned. But there can be no doubt of its termination. They were expected to speak Hebrew. (Chronicles of Scotland, p. 250. By Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie. Edinburgh, 1814.)
“Were it possible,” says Dr Smith, “that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.” (Theory of Moral Sentiments, i. 277, 278.)
page 185 note † See account of Peter the Wild Boy, and other instances, in Monboddo's work on the Origin and Progress of Language. Edinburgh, 1773.
page 185 note ‡ Life of Adam Smith, LL.D. p, 47. 4to, Edinburgh, 1811.
page 185 note § Personal Narrative, iii. 245.
page 186 note * Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 9.
page 188 note * Origines Sacræ, &c. i. 2. By Edward Stillingfleet, D.D. late Bishop of Worcester.
page 188 note † Ibid. i. 4.
page 189 note * Raynal's Hist, of East and West Indies, Book xviii.
page 190 note * Malthus, , Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 43, 4to edition.Google Scholar
page 190 note † Robertson's America, ii. 117.
page 190 note ‡ Buckingham's Travels in Mesopotamia, i. 300.
page 190 note § Personal Narrative, iii. 211.
page 191 note * Personal Narrative, iv. 319.
page 191 note † “The circumstances of the soil and the climate determine whether the inhabitant shall apply himself chiefly to agriculture or pasture; whether he shall fix his residence, or be moving continually about with all his possessions.” (An Essay on the History of Civil Society. By Ferguson, Adam, LLD. p. 162.)Google Scholar
“The wide extended plains inhabited by the Tartar tribes, without a shrub, which the Russians call Steppes, are covered with a luxuriant grass, admirably fitted for the pasture of numerous herds and flocks.” The inhabitants are “necessarily condemned to a pastoral life.” (An Essay on the Principle of Population, &c. 4to. p. 92. By T. R. Malthus.)
See also Alison on Population, vol. i. p. 21, 22; and Heeren's Manual of Ancient History, p. 16.
page 193 note * Sketches of the History of Man, i. 46.
page 193 note † Histoire Naturelle, edit. Sonnini, xxix. 239.
page 193 note ‡ Ibid. xxii. 65.
page 193 note § Ibid. xxii. 70.
page 193 note ∥ History of East and West Indies, Book xviii.
page 193 note ¶ Robertson's History of America, ii. 124.
page 193 note ** Principles of Geology, iii. 74.
page 194 note * The Natural History of Society in the Barbarous and Civilized State, &c. i. 195, 196.
page 194 note † Règne Animal, i. 152.
page 194 note ‡ Desmarest, Mammalogie, 494.
page 195 note * “The natural state of the horse, it may be said, is not that of freedom, but of domestication.” (Illustrations of the Breeds of Domestic Animals in the British Islands, No. vi. p. 6. By Low, David, Esq. F.R.S.E.)Google Scholar
page 195 note † Desmarest, Mammalogie, 422.
page 195 note ‡ De la Sociabilité des Animaux, Mém. du Mus. xii, 1. “It is difficult to conceive how they could commence and maintain the submission of animals without this disposition to sociability, if we consider, above all, at what time of human civilization the domestic animals appear to have become so.” (P. 19.)
page 195 note § Mémoires du Museum, xiii. 406.
page 195 note ∥ Ibid.
page 196 note * Buffon, Hist. Nat. xxiii. 99.
page 196 note † Ibid. p. 67.
page 196 note ‡ Anson's Voyage round the World, 4to, p. 309. Lond. 1776.
page 196 note § Personal Narrative, iv. 340. In Paraguay, they are put in harness when caught, and a day is sufficient to tame them. (Robertson's Letters on Paraguay, ii. 6.)
page 196 note ∥ Fauna Boreali-Americanæ, p. 279.
page 196 note ¶ De l'Influence de la Domesticité sur les Animaux, Ann. des Sciences Nat. xxi. 52.
page 197 note * Phil. Trans. 1787, p. 253.
page 198 note * Hasselquist's Travels in the Levant, 90, 91.
page 198 note † Humboldt, Personal Narrative, iv. 340.
page 198 note ‡ History of America, ii. 117.
page 198 note § Mr Malthus, however, is of a different opinion. “If hunger alone could have prompted the savage tribes of America to such a change in their habits, I do not conceive that there would have been a single nation of hunters and fishers remaining; but it it evident that some fortunate train of circumstances, in addition to this stimulus, is necessary for this purpose.” (An Essay on the Principle of Population, &c. By T. R. Malthus, A.M. 4to, p. 43.) And in another place, he says, “It may be said, however, of the shepherd as of the hunter, that, if want alone could effect a change of habits, there would be few pastoral tribes remaining.” (P. 92.)
page 199 note * Règne Animal, i. 78.
page 199 note † The Principles of Population, and their Connection with Human Happiness, i. 10. By Archibald Alison, Esq. F.R.S.E.
Professor Low considers the ox and sheep, domesticated from the earliest records of human society, to have been instruments, under Providence, for leading man from the savage state. (Illustrations of the Breeds of Domestic Animals in the British Islands, No. iv. p. 11. By David Low, Esq. F.R.S.E.)
page 200 note * Buffon, xxiii. 177.
page 200 note † Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher, p. 36.
page 201 note * Nat. Hist. of Society, ii. 87.
page 201 note † Nouv. Dict. xxiv. 27.
page 201 note ‡ Ibid.
page 201 note § Theophrastus and Pliny give the Indies as the country of barley.
page 201 note ∥ Sketches of the History of Man, i. 45.
page 201 note ¶ In the East, it was in Babylonia, according to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, where the grains grew naturally,—the very place which may be regarded as the cradle of civilization.”—Des Longchamps, in Dict, des Sciences Naturelles, tom. xix. Art. Froment.
page 202 note * Ann. des Sciences Nat. ix. 61.
page 203 note * Mém. du Mus. d'Hist. Nat. xv. 145.—The wheat grown in Abyssinia is, according to Bruce, smaller than the Egyptian wheat.
page 204 note * The Cerealia seem to be particularly indicated in the following passage of Genesis:—“Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth;”—and to distinguish these seed-bearing herbs from trees, the latter are mentioned by name in what follows:—“and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat,” (Gen. i. 29.) And connecting this with what is related in a subsequent passage, when the denunciation was passed on our race—“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” it appears almost certain that the Cerealia were known to man from his origin.
page 204 note † The sire of gods and men, with hard decrees,
Forbids our plenty to be bought with ease,
And wills that mortal man, inured to toil,
Should exercise, with pains, the grudging soil.
Virgil, Georg. B.
page 205 note * Origin and Progress of Language, vol. i. Book ii. p. 273–4.
page 206 note * Genesis, xxiv. 32.
page 207 note * The Book of Job literally translated, by J. Mason Good, F.R.S. Introd. p. i.
page 207 note † Genesis, xi. 4.—x. 10.
page 207 note ‡ “The boundless riches of the Babylonian fields gave birth,” says Mr Alison, “even in the first ages, to those stupendous cities from whence the enterprise of commerce dispersed the human race in every direction through central Asia; while the uniform pasturage of the Scythian wilds spread before them a vast highway stored with food, by means of which they could penetrate with ease to the remotest extremities of the old world.”—Alison on Population, i. 22.
“Supposing Babel or Babylon to have been the centre of irradiation—how easy was the transit for Ham's descendants into Africa by the Isthmus of Suez; into Europe the path was still more open for those of Japhet; and as the stream of population spread to the east, the passage to America was not difficult to those who had arrived at Behring's Straits.”—Kirby's Bridgewater Treatise, i. 76.
page 208 note * “Very few of the numerous coral islets and volcanoes of the vast Pacific, capable of sustaining a few families of men, have been found untenanted; and we have therefore to inquire whence and by what means, if all the members of the great human family have had one common source, could these savages have migrated. Cook, Forster, and others, have remarked that parties of savages in their canoes must often have lost their way, and must have been driven on distant shores, where they were forced to remain, deprived both of the means and of the requisite intelligence for returning to their own country. Thus Captain Cook found on the island of Wateoo three inhabitants of Otaheite, who had been drifted thither in a canoe, although the distance between the two isles is 550 miles. In 1696, two canoes, containing thirty persons, who had left Ancorso, were thrown by contrary winds and storms on the island of Samar, one of the Philippines, at a distance of 800 miles. In 1721 two canoes, one of which contained twenty-four, and the other six persons, men, women, and children, were drifted from an island called Farroilep to the island of Guaham, one of the Marians, a distance of 200 miles.”—Lyell's Principles of Geology, iii. 157.
Kotzebue mentions an instance of four persons being drifted in an open boat to the distance of 1500 miles. Captain Bligh with eighteen persons in an open boat traversed, in forty-one days, a distance of 3618 miles, from near Otaheite to Timor in the Indian Ocean; and a number of other instances might be mentioned from the narratives of travellers, of the spread of the race in circumstances where the knowledge and habits of civilized life might be so far lost in the necessities of their situation.
page 209 note * Personal Narrative, iii. 208. “How can we distinguish the prolonged infancy of the human race,” says Humboldt, “if it anywhere exists, from that state of moral degradation in which solitariness, want, compulsory misery, forced migrations, or the rigour of the climate, obliterate even the traces of civilization ? If every thing which is connected with the primitive state of man, and the first population of a continent, could from its nature belong to the domain of history, we should appeal to the traditions of India, to that opinion so often expressed in the laws of Menore and in the Ramajan, which considers savages as tribes banished from civil society, and driven into the forests.”—Humboldt's Personal Narrative, iii. 203.