the covert, to a hidden lagoon, on the banks of which stood, not Manoa,
but a tiny Indian village.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW AMYAS WAS TEMPTED OF THE DEVIL

"Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In always climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall, and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease."

TENNYSON.

Humboldt has somewhere a curious passage; in which, looking on some
wretched group of Indians, squatting stupidly round their fires,
besmeared with grease and paint, and devouring ants and clay, he
somewhat naively remarks, that were it not for science, which teaches
us that such is the crude material of humanity, and this the state from
which we all have risen, he should have been tempted rather to look upon
those hapless beings as the last degraded remnants of some fallen and
dying race. One wishes that the great traveller had been bold enough
to yield to that temptation, which his own reason and common sense
presented to him as the real explanation of the sad sight, instead
of following the dogmas of a so-called science, which has not a fact
whereon to base its wild notion, and must ignore a thousand facts in
asserting it. His own good sense, it seems, coincided instinctively with
the Bible doctrine, that man in a state of nature is a fallen being,
doomed to death--a view which may be a sad one, but still one more
honorable to poor humanity than the theory, that we all began as some
sort of two-handed apes. It is surely more hopeful to believe that those
poor Otomacs or Guahibas were not what they ought to be, than to believe
that they were. It is certainly more complimentary to them to think that
they had been somewhat nobler and more prudent in centuries gone by,
than that they were such blockheads as to have dragged on, the son after
the father, for all the thousands of years which have elapsed since man
was made, without having had wit enough to discover any better food than
ants and clay.

Our voyagers, however, like those of their time, troubled their heads
with no such questions. Taking the Bible story as they found it, they
agreed with Humboldt's reason, and not with his science; or, to speak
correctly, agreed with Humboldt's self, and not with the shallow
anthropologic theories which