In the Steppes and Deserts of Sand we have seen men ignorant and wild, semi-brutalized in manner and tastes, and miserable in condition: some sedentary and peaceful, cultivating with laborious care an ungrateful soil; others, and by far the greater number, nomadic and pastoral in their habits; and others, again, living partly on the product of their herds, partly on the plunder obtained by a life of piracy. But between these races and civilized nations there still exist some analogies of belief, of polity, of social economy. In the sacred codes which fill, for them, the place of our elaborate legal and political systems, lofty precepts of justice and charity, salutary rules of morality and hygiène, mingle with barbarous customs and absurd or superstitious practices. Their religions, founded, like Christianity itself, on the idea of a Divine unity, a God of mercy and punishment, they hold in common with peoples who have left their mark on the history of the world, and to whom, moreover, they are attached by close ties of consanguinity. Widely different is the man of the Prairies and the Forests, the _Savage_, who even to our own days has remained plunged in the lowest depths of social, intellectual, and moral development. Differing the one from the other, according to the country which they inhabit, the colour of the skin, the features of the countenance, and sometimes the forms and outlines of the body, savages everywhere approximate very closely in the general character of their instincts, sentiments, and ideas, and represent to us that early condition of humanity from which it has only been elevated by the Divine impulse and for the Divine purposes. Assuredly it is not these whom Bonald has in view when he defines Man as "an intelligence served by organs;" for with them the respective parts of the mind and the body are inverted, and the first is the very humble servant of the second; its sphere of activity, accordingly, is very much restricted. War, the chase, the coarse pleasures of the banquet, the dance--and what a wild, barbarous, sensual dance it is!--the recital and glorification of the deeds of their ancestors, their nation, and themselves, mingled with marvellous improbabilities which he readily accepts for authentic histories, and finally, gambling--these are the only pleasures of the savage.