It is a favourite study with the scholar to trace the remains of Grecian or Roman workmanship; he turns over his Montfaucon with learned satisfaction; and he gazes with rapture on the noble collection of Sir William Hamilton.  The amusement is rational and instructive.  But will not his curiosity be more awakened, will he not find even more real matter for important reflection, by passing an hour in surveying the numerous specimens of the ingenuity of our newly-discovered friends, brought from the utmost recesses of the globe to enrich the British Museum, and the valuable repository of Sir Ashton Lever?  If the curiosities of Sir Ashton’s Sandwich-room alone were the only acquisition gained by our visits to the Pacific Ocean, who, that has taste to admire, or even eyes to behold, could hesitate to pronounce that Captain Cook had not sailed in vain?  The expence of his three voyages did not, perhaps, far exceed that of digging out the buried contents of Herculaneum.  And we may add, that the novelties of the Society or Sandwich Islands seem better calculated to engage the attention of the studious in our times, than the antiquities which exhibit proofs of Roman magnificence.

The grounds for making this remark cannot be better explained, than in the words of a very ingenious writer:  " In an age,” says Mr Warton,[57] “advanced to the highest degree of refinement, that species of curiosity commences, which is busied in contemplating the progress of social life, in displaying the gradation of science, and in tracing the transition from barbarism to civility.  That these speculations should become the favourite topics of such a period, is extremely natural.  We look back on the savage condition of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority; and are pleased to mark the steps by which we have been raised from rudeness to elegance; and our reflections on this subject are accompanied with a conscious pride, arising, in a great measure, from a tacit comparison of the infinite disproportion between the feeble efforts of remote ages, and our present improvements in knowledge.  In the mean time, the manners, monuments, customs, practices, and opinions of antiquity, by forming so strong a contrast with those of our own times, and by exhibiting human nature and human inventions in new lights, in unexpected appearances, and in various forms, are objects which forcibly strike a feeling imagination.  Nor does this spectacle afford nothing more than a fruitless gratification to the fancy.  It teaches us to set a just estimation on our own acquisitions, and encourages us to cherish that cultivation, which is so closely connected with the existence and the exercise of every social virtue.”  We need not here observe, that the manners, monuments, customs, practices, and opinions of the present inhabitants of the Pacific Ocean, or of the west side of North America, form the strongest contrast with those of our own time in polished Europe; and that a feeling imagination will probably be more struck with the narration of the ceremonies of a Natche at Tongataboo, than of a Gothic tournament at London; with the contemplation of the colossuses of Easter Island, than of the mysterious remains of Stonehenge.[58]