After this taste of Baudin's reflections, it is really a pity that we possess so little from his pen. Had he lived to be the historian of the expedition, his work would have been very different in character from that of Peron; though it is hardly likely that an elaboration of the views expressed in the personal letter to King would have been favoured with the imprint "de l'Imprimerie Imperiale." Peron's anthropological studies among Australian aboriginals led him to conclusions totally at variance with the nebulous "state of nature" theories of the time, which pictured the civilised being as a degenerate from man unspoiled by law, government, and convention. The tests and measurements of blacks which he made, and compared with those of French and English people, showed him that even physically the native was an inferior animal; his observations of ways of life in the wild Bush taught him that organised society, with all its restraints, was preferable to the supposed freedom of savagery; and he deduced the philosophical conclusion that the "state of nature" was in truth a state of subjection to pitiless forces, only endurable by beings who felt not the bondage because they knew of no more ennobled condition.* (* A more distinguished man was cured of his early Rousseauism by an acquaintance with peoples far higher in the scale of advancement than Australian aboriginals. "Up to sixteen years of age," said Napoleon in a scrap of conversation recorded by Roederer, "I would have fought for Rousseau against all the friends of Voltaire. Now it is the contrary. I have been especially disgusted with Rousseau since I have seen the East. Savage man is a dog.") Baudin carried away from his visits to the abodes of untutored races no truer notion than came from his own unsubstantiated sentiments, nourished by no contact with facts, but imbibed uncritically from the rhetorical rhapsodists of Rousseau's school. Crabbe summed them up in half a dozen lines: "Tis the savage state Is only good, and ours sophisticate! See! the free creatures in their woods and plains, Where without laws each happy monarch reigns, King of himself--while we a number dread, By slaves commanded and by dunces led."