ove mentioned, has introduced one of the persons in his second
dialogue, as objecting to the theory of the human race having gradually
advanced from a savage to a civilized state, on the ground that "the
first man must have inevitably been destroyed by the elements or
devoured by savage beasts, so infinitely his superiors in physical
force."[937] He then contends against the difficulty here started by
various arguments, all of which were, perhaps, superfluous; for if a
philosopher is pleased to indulge in conjectures on this subject, why
should he not assign, as the original seat of man, some one of those
large islands within the tropics, which are as free from large beasts of
prey as Van Diemen's Land or Australia? Here man may have remained for a
period, peculiar to a single island, just as some of the large
anthropomorphous species are now limited to one island within the
tropics. In such a situation, the new-born race might have lived in
security, though far more helpless than the New Holland savages, and
might have found abundance of vegetable food. Colonies may afterwards
have been sent forth from this mother country, and then the peopling of
the earth may have proceeded according to the hypothesis before alluded
to.

To form a probable conjecture respecting the country from whence the
early civilization of India was derived, has been found almost as
difficult as to determine the original birth-place of the human race.
That the dawn of oriental civilization did not arise within the limits
of the tropics, is the conclusion to which Baron William von Humboldt
has come after much patient research into "the diversities of the
structure of language and their influence on the mental development of
the human race." According to him the ancient Zend country from whence
the spread of knowledge and the arts has been traced in a south-easterly
direction, lay to the north-west of the upper Indus.[938]

As to the time of the first appearance of man upon the earth, if we are
to judge from the discordance of opinion amongst celebrated
chronologers, not even a rude approximation has yet been made towards
determining a point of so much interest. The problem seems hitherto to
have baffled the curiosity of the antiquary, if possible, more
completely than the fixing on a geographical site for the original
habitation of the ancestors of the human race. The Chevalier Bunsen, in
his elaborate and philosophical work on Ancient Egypt,[93