In truth, it may be safely said, that every circumstance that can be discovered concerning the particular country, and every thing, whether animate or inanimate that is on its surface, comes within the compass of its history, using that word in the sense of merely civil history,--unless in so far as it belongs to what is natural history. And yet even from this science civil history has many lights to receive. Human physiology is intimately connected with the elucidations of the historian; and it would appear that, in regard to the influence of political institutions on the physical as well as the moral state of races of men, we are still only on the threshold of knowledge. Here the physiologist, and the recorder of political events, who heretofore have travelled on different roads, may some day or other find a common object of exertion, and may tell us, by their united labours, why the race that inhabited ancient Egypt, from being the most inventive, should have been among the most supine of people; why the Chinese should have passed through an epoch of active discovery, and should have thenceforth, unlike the rest of the world, neither forgotten nor improved the fruits of their original enterprise; why the Celts, once the nurses of European learning, should, at a later time, have appeared as if doomed to retire before the ardent genius of the Teutonic race; and why this race, after being long inferior to other branches of the Caucasian family, should appear, with British enterprise and German thought, likely to absorb the faculties of the rest of mankind. The historian must not wholly neglect other natural productions. The inferior animals and the vegetable kingdom are intimately connected with the fate of the human beings who are the immediate object of his labours. With geology he may appear to have comparatively little concern; yet the marble of Greece, and the coal and iron of Britain, have had no little influence on the destinies of these nations.