[29] This view will be found in the first chapter of Mr J. S. Mill's "Principles of Political Economy," ch. i. p. 6. "There is perhaps no people or community now existing which subsist entirely on the spontaneous produce of vegetation." [Whether mankind ever lived "entirely on," &c., may be questioned, but it is implied in Gen. ix. 3 that man did not subsist on animal food until after the Deluge, a fact which lies at the foundation of Porphyry's work, "De Abstinentia."] "But many tribes still live exclusively, or almost exclusively, on wild animals, the produce of hunting or fishing.... The first _great advance beyond this state_ consists in the domestication of the more useful animals: giving rise to the _the pastoral or nomad state.... From this state of society to the agricultural_, the transition is not indeed easy (for no great change in the habits of mankind is otherwise than difficult, and in general either painful or very slow), but it lies in what may be called the spontaneous course of events." [30] Mr Hepworth Dixon's "New America," vol. i. p. 113. Now, in the first place, I must remark that the Iroquois and the Arab have never progressed;[31] neither does the Arab at the present show any signs of a transition to the third stage of necessary growth, nor does Mr Hepworth Dixon, although he gives some sound practical advice as to the best mode in which the red man is to be restrained, venture to suggest any mode by which he is to be reclaimed from the first to the third stage, either with or without a transition through the second stage of development. The conclusion therefore, one would think, would be inevitable that it is an affair _of race_ and _not_ of development. The Arab and the Iroquois, after the lapse of so many centuries, are still found with the evidences of primitive life strong upon them; and so, I imagine, we shall find it wherever we come upon a pure race of homogeneous origin. On the contrary, we shall find that mixed races, by the very law and reason of their admixture, have shown the greatest adaptibility, and, whenever circumstances were favourable, very rapid growth. Again, I very much question whether the three stages, or rather three phases of life were ever, as a rule, progressive; and whether, in the cases in which they might chance to have been successive, anything occurred in the transition at all resembling an uniform law of growth. It is very much more probable that the three were from the earliest period contemporaneous[32]--"and Abel was a shepherd, and Cain an husbandman" (Gen. iv.)--the determination of the sons to the avocations of shepherd, husbandman, and hunter respectively (the latter most probably being the last selected), being influenced by taste, character, and the division of the inheritance, the authority of the father, the geographical conditions of the route, and chance