Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/258

248 earth; and that it is an idea more worthy of the power and wisdom of the Creator, to assume that he gave to each zone and each climate its proper inhabitants, to whom that zone and climate would be the most suitable, than to assume that the human species has degenerated in such innumerable instances."

He also argued that great national races never sprang from the growth of a single family into a nation, but always from the association of several families of human beings, raised above their fellow-animals by the nature of their wants, and the gradual invention of a language; each of which families, probably, had originally formed a language peculiar to itself:

Whatever foundation there might be for history thus taught it is scarcely for us to say. Certain it is, it would have no possible reference to Biblical history. Niebuhr had, at this early period of life, a peculiar inclination to the English, whom he studied both for his literary and historical improvement:

He made quite a hero of the imagination of Algernon Sidney. "This," he said, writing from Kiel, December 6th, 1794, "day is the anniversary of Algernon Sidney's death, one hundred and eleven years ago, and hence it is in my eyes a consecrated day, especially as I have just been studying his noble life again. May God preserve me from a death like his; yet, even with such a death, the virtue and holiness of his life would not be dearly purchased. And now he is forgotten almost throughout the world; and perhaps there are not fifty persons in all Germany who have taken the pains to inform themselves accurately about his life and fortunes. Many may know his name, many know