Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    manifest what is called civilization; but never in rude and shelterless circumstances, or when widely scattered. Even men who have been civilized, when transferred to a wide wilderness, where each has to work hard and isolatedly for the first requi- sites of life, soon shew a retrogression to barbarism : witness the plains of Australia, as well as the backwoods of Canada and the prairies of Texas. Fixity of residence and thickening of population are perhaps the prime requisites for civilization, and hence it will be found that all civilizations as yet known have taken place in regions physically limited. That of Egypt arose in a narrow valley hemmed in by deserts on both sides. That of Greece took its rise in a small peninsula bounded on the only land side by mountains. Etruria and Rome were naturally limited regions. Civili- zations have taken place at both the eastern and western extremities of the elder continent— China and Japan, on the one hand; Germany, Holland, Britain, France, on the other—while the great unmarked tract between contains nations decidedly less advanced. Why is this, but because the sea, in both cases, has imposed limits to further migration, and caused the population to settle and condense —the conditions most necessary for social improve-
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