circumstances.  Accident, I conceive, must have had some influence in laying the foundations of certain arts; and a climate in which labour was not too oppressive, and in which the exertion of industry was required to provide for the wants of life must have fixed the character of the activity of the early improving people; where nature is 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 with everything necessary for their wants and their happiness; they had only one duty to perform, by their obedience to prove their love and devotion to their Creator.  In this they failed, and death—­or