g without whose notice not even a sparrow falls to the ground, has
provided for the supply of their wants, and has adapted each to the
element in which it moves. To birds he has given a clothing of feathers;
and to quadrupeds, of furs, adapted to their latitudes. Where art is
requisite in providing food for future want, or in constructing a
needful habitation, as in the case of the bee and the beaver, a peculiar
aptitude has been bestowed, which, in all the inferior races of animals,
has been found adequate to their necessities. The crocodile that issues
from its egg in the warm sand, and never sees its parent, becomes, it
has been well said, as perfect and as knowing as any crocodile.

Not so with man! "He comes into the world," says an eloquent writer,
"the most helpless and dependent of living beings, long to continue so.
If deserted by parents at an early age, so that he can learn only what
the experience of one life may teach him--as to a few individuals has
happened, who yet have attained maturity in woods and deserts--he grows
up in some respect inferior to the nobler brutes. Now, as regards many
regions of the earth, history exhibits the early human inhabitants in
states of ignorance and barbarism, not far removed from this lowest
possible grade, which civilized men may shudder to contemplate. But
these countries, occupied formerly by straggling hordes of miserable
savages, who could scarcely defend themselves against the wild beasts
that shared the woods with them, and the inclemencies of the weather,
and the consequences of want and fatigue; and who to each other were
often more dangerous than any wild beasts, unceasingly warring among
themselves, and destroying each other with every species of savage, and
even cannibal cruelty--countries so occupied formerly, are now become
the abodes of myriads of peaceful, civilized, and friendly men, where
the desert and impenetrable forest are changed into cultivated fields,
rich gardens, and magnificent cities.

"It is the strong intellect of man, operating with the faculty of
language as a means, which has gradually worked this wonderful change.
By language, fathers communicated their gathered experience and
reflections to their children, and these to succeeding children, with
new accumulation; and when, after many generations, the precious store
had grown until memory could contain no more, the arts of writing, and
then of printing, arose, making language visible and p