on following
generation, which were required to bring to a moderate state of
advancement the great primary arts subservient to physical life--the
arts of providing food, habitation, clothing, and defence, _we_ are
utterly unable to conceive. We are _born_ to the knowledge which was
collected by the labours of many ages. How slowly were those arts reared
up which still remain to us! How many which had laboriously been brought
to perfection, have been displaced by superior invention, and fallen
into oblivion! Fenced in as we are by the works of our predecessors, we
see but a small part of the power of man contending with the
difficulties of his lot. But what a wonderful scene would be opened
before our eyes, with what intense interest should we look on, if we
could indeed behold him armed only with his own implanted powers, and
going forth to conquer the creation! If we could see him beginning by
subduing evils, and supplying painful wants--going on to turn those
evils and wants into the means of enjoyment--and at length, in the
wantonness and pride of his power, filling his existence with
luxuries;--if we could see him from his first step, in the untamed
though fruitful wilderness, advancing to subdue the soil, to tame and
multiply the herds--from bending the branches into a bower, to fell the
forest and quarry the rock--seizing into his own hands the element of
fire, directing its action on substances got from the bowels of the
earth--fashioning wood, and stone, and metal, to the will of his
thought--searching the nature of plants to spin their fibres, or with
their virtues to heal his diseases;--if we could see him raise his first
cities, launch his first ship, calling the winds and waters to be his
servants, and to do his work--changing the face of the earth--forming
lakes and rivers--joining seas, or stretching the continent itself into
the dominion of the sea;--if we could do all this in imagination, then
should we understand something of what man's intellect has done for his
physical life, and what the necessities of his physical life have done
in forcing into action all the powers of his intelligence.

But there are still higher considerations arising from the influence of
man's physical necessities on the destiny of the species. It is this
subjugation of natural evil, and this created dominion of art, that
prepares the earth to be the scene of his social existence. His hard
conquest was not the end of his toil. H