The two sexes likewise by living a
little more at their ease began to lose somewhat of their usual
ferocity and sturdiness; but if on the one hand individuals became
less able to engage separately with wild beasts, they on the other
were more easily got together to make a common resistance against
them.

In this new state of things, the simplicity and solitariness of man's
life, the limitedness of his wants, and the instruments which he had
invented to satisfy them, leaving him a great deal of leisure, he
employed it to supply himself with several conveniences unknown to his
ancestors; and this was the first yoke he inadvertently imposed upon
himself, and the first source of mischief which he prepared for his
children; for besides continuing in this manner to soften both body
and mind, these conveniences having through use lost almost all their
aptness to please, and even degenerated into real wants, the privation
of them became far more intolerable than the possession of them had
been agreeable; to lose them was a misfortune, to possess them no
happiness.

Here we may a little better discover how the use of speech insensibly
commences or improves in the bosom of every family, and may likewise
from conjectures concerning the manner in which divers particular
causes might have propagated language, and accelerated its progress by
rendering it every day more and more necessary. Great inundations or
earthquakes surrounded inhabited districts with water or precipices,
portions of the continent were by revolutions of the globe torn off
and split into islands. It is obvious that among men thus collected,
and forced to live together, a common idiom must have started up much
sooner, than among those who freely wandered through the forests of
the main land. Thus it is very possible that the inhabitants of the
islands formed in this manner, after their first essays in navigation,
brought among us the use of speech; and it is very probable at least
that society and languages commenced in islands and even acquired
perfection there, before the inhabitants of the continent knew
anything of either.

Everything now begins to wear a new aspect. Those who heretofore
wandered through the woods, by taking to a more settled way of life,
gradually flock together, coalesce into several separate bodies, and
at length form in every country distinct nations, united in character
and manners, not by any laws or regulations, but by an uniform m