too kind a mother, man is generally a spoiled child; where she is
severe, and a stepmother, his powers are usually withered and destroyed.
The people of the south and the north and those between the tropics
offer, even at this day, proof of the truth of this principle; and it is
even possible now to find on the surface of the earth, all the different
gradations of the states of society, from that in which man is scarcely
removed above the brute, to that in which he appears approaching in his
nature to a divine intelligence. Besides, reason being the noblest gift
of God to man, I can hardly suppose that an infinitely powerful and all-
wise Creator would bestow upon the early inhabitants of the globe a
greater proportion of instinct than was at first necessary to preserve
their existence, and that he would not leave the great progress of their
improvement to the development and exaltation of their reasoning powers.

_Amb_.--You appear to me in your argument to have forgotten the influence
that any civilised race must possess over savages; and many of the
nations which you consider as in their original state, may have descended
from nations formerly civilised; and, it is quite as easy to trace the
retrograde steps of a people as their advances; the savage hordes who now
inhabit the northern coast of Africa are probably descended from the
opulent, commercial, and ingenious Carthaginians who once contended with
Rome for the empire of the world; and even nearer home, we might find in
Southern Italy and her islands, proofs of a degradation not much
inferior. What I contend for is the civilisation of the first
patriarchal races who peopled the East, and who passed into Europe from
Armenia, in which paradise is supposed to have been placed. The early
civilisation of this race could only have been in consequence of their
powers and instincts having been of a higher character than those of
savages. They appear to have been small families--a state not at all
fitted for the discovery of arts by the exercise of the mind; and they
professed the most sublime form of religion, the worship of one Supreme
Intelligence--a truth which, after a thousand years of civilisation, was
with difficulty attained by the most powerful efforts of reasoning by the
Greek sages. It appears to me, that in the history of the Jews, nothing
can be more in conformity to our ideas of just analogy than this series
of events. Our first parents were created w