circumstances. [31] _Vide_ Sir S. Baker; _vide_ note, ch. xiii., _Noah_. [32] The following passage, _inter alia_, from Herodotus seems to sustain this--"To the eastward _of those Scythians_, who apply themselves to _the culture of the land_, and on the other side of the river Panticapes, the country is inhabited by Scythians who _neither plough nor sow_, but are employed in _keeping cattle_."--_Herod._, iv., Mel. And this is the more confirmed when we consider that when once the hunter started on his career, he would have determined their avocation also for his posterity. At his death he would not have had herds of cattle to apportion to any one of his sons, and thus the taste for wild life, necessarily perpetuated, would be bred in the bone, as an indomitable characteristic of race, and the first hunter by choice would inevitably come to be the progenitor of generations of hunters by instinct and necessity. The second theory depicts the opening scene of human existence as a state of conflict, which, it must be allowed, is perfectly consistent with the theory that it was one of savagery. The theory I am now combating was originally the theory of Hobbes; and I might have regarded it as now obsolete, were it not that it has cropped up quite recently in a most respectable quarter. Mr Hunter, in his charming work, "The Annals of Rural Bengal," has a passage which, as I think, has been taken for more than it intends, though not for more than it expresses. Mr Hunter says, p. 89-- "The inquiry leads us back to that far-off time which we love to associate with patriarchal stillness. Yet the echoes of ancient life in India little resemble a Sicilian idyl or the strains of Pan's pipe, but strike the ear rather as the cries of oppressed and wandering nations, of people in constant motion and pain. Early Indian researches, however, while they make havoc of the pastoral landscapes of Genesis and Job, have a consolation peculiarly suited to this age. They plainly tell us, that as in Europe so in Asia, the primitive state of mankind was a state of unrest; and that civilisation, despite its exactions and nervous city life, is a state of repose."