noted. Some short extracts from early chapters will illustrate the style and treatment:—
"A long period elapsed before men of singular endowments formed and taught to others the first rudiments of an imperfect and barbarous language, which had not, however, been necessary to the establishment of some degree of society. There were even entire nations which had never succeeded in forming a regular language, or gaining a distinct pronunciation: such were the Troglodytes, according to Pliny; such are still the tribes about the Cape of Good Hope. But what a distance between this barbarous jargon and the art of painting one's thoughts!
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"The most populous countries were doubtless the warm climates, where man found easy and abundant nourishment in the cocoas, dates, pine-apples, and rice which grew of themselves. It is very likely that India, China, and the borders of the Euphrates and Tigris, were thickly populated when the rest of the globe was almost a desert. In our northern climates, on the contrary, it was much easier to encounter a herd of wolves than a society of men.
"The capture of Constantinople alone sufficed to crush the spirit of ancient Greece. The genius of the Romans was destroyed by the Goths, The coasts of Africa, once so flourishing, are now only the haunts of banditti. Still greater changes have taken place in climates less favourable. Physical have joined with moral causes; for if the ocean has not entirely changed its bed, it has, at least, alternately covered and abandoned vast regions. Nature has been exposed to many scourges, many vicissitudes. The fairest, the most fertile territories of western Europe, all the low lands watered by rivers, have been covered with the ocean during a prodigious multitude of ages.
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"What notion had the earliest peoples of the 'soul'? That which our rustics have before they have learned their Catechism, or even afterwards. They get only a confused idea,
