to laws and social institutions.  The discovery of peculiar arts gives superiority to particular nations; and the love of power induces them to employ this superiority to subjugate other nations, who learn their arts, and ultimately adopt their manners; so that in reality the origin, as well as the progress and improvement, of civil society is founded in mechanical and chemical inventions.  No people have ever arrived at any degree of perfection in their institutions who have not possessed in a high degree the useful and refined arts.  The comparison of savage and civilized man, in fact, demonstrates the triumph of chemical and mechanical philosophy as the causes not only of the physical, but ultimately even of moral improvement.  Look at the condition of man in the lowest state in which we are acquainted with him.  Take the native of New Holland, advanced only a few steps above the animal creation, and that principally by the use of fire; naked, defending himself against wild beasts or killing them for food only by weapons made of wood hardened in the fire, or pointed with stones or fish bones; living only in holes dug out of the earth, or in huts rudely constructed of a few branches of trees covered with grass; having no approach to the enjoyment of luxuries or even comforts; unable to provide for his most pressing wants; having a language scarcely articulate, relating only to the great objects of nature, or to his most pressing necessities or desires, and living solitary or in single families, unacquainted with religion, government, or laws, submitted to the mercy of nature or the elements.  How different is man in his highest state of cultivation; every part of his body covered with the products of different chemical and mechanical arts made not only useful in protecting him from the inclemency of the seasons but combined in forms of beauty and variety; creating out of the dust of the earth from the clay under his feet instruments of use and ornament; extracting metals from the rude ore and giving to them a hundred different shapes for a thousand different purposes; selecting and improving the vegetable productions with which he covers the earth; not only subduing but taming and domesticating the wildest, the fleetest, and the strongest inhabitants of the wood, the mountain, and the air; making the winds carry him on every part of the immense ocean; and compelling the elements of air, water, and even fire as it were to labour for him; concentrating in small space materials which act as the thunderbolt, and directing their energies so as to destroy at immense distances; blasting the rock, removing the mountain, carrying water from the valley to the hill; perpetuating thought in imperishable words, rendering immortal the exertion of genius, and presenting them as common property to all awakening minds, becoming as it were the true image of divine intelligence receiving and bestowing the breath of life in the influence of civilization.