How, then, say scientifically that your fetich age, or the age of superstition, the theological age of the positivists, instead being the infancy of the nation, is not its last stage next preceding death? How determine physiologically or scientifically that the savage is the infant man and not the worn-out man? Then how determine that the superstition of which you have so much to say, and which, with you, means religion, revelation, the church, everything that claims to be, or that asserts, anything supernatural, is not characteristic of the last stage of human development, and not of the first? Our modern physiologists and anti-Christian speculators seem all to take it for granted that the savage gives us the type of the primitive man. We refuted this absurd notion in our essay on _Faith and the Sciences_. There are no known historical facts to support it. Consult the record chronicled in the rocks, as read by geologists. What does it prove? {161} Why, in the lowest and most ancient strata in which human remains are found, along with those of extinct species of animals, you find that the men of that epoch used stone implements, and were ignorant of metals or unable to work them, and, therefore, must have been savages. That is, the men who lived then, and in that locality. Be it so. But does this prove that there did not, contemporary with them, in other localities or in other quarters of the globe, live and flourish nations in the full vigor of the manhood of the race, having all the arts and implements of civilized life? Did the savages of New England, when first discovered, understand working in iron, and used they not stone axes, and stone knives, many of which we have ourselves picked up? And was it the same with Europeans? From the rudeness and uncivilized condition of a people in one locality, you can conclude nothing as to the primitive condition of the race.