6 Aug. 1814

Logic

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Ch. │ │ Methodization

'. │ │ Subalternation

5

Under the direction of an attentive observer, Geography serves in some sort for supplying the deficiencies left by History. The description of nations exhibiting themselves on different levels in the scale of improvement, or to speak more precisely having before them fields of observation of different extent, serve when put together to exhibit a simultaneous view of no inconsiderable portion of the history of mankind.

In this view the most curious, and to the purpose of instruction the most valuable, chapter in this sort of contemporary history would be composed of the vocabulary - if a compleat one could be obtained - of a tribe the seat of which, even supposing it have all along been there, [was] in the narrowest field as yet known: in a small and thinly inhabited island or cluster of islands, destitute of communication with any other inhabited portion of the globe.

At Otaheite, at the time of the discovery of that groupe of Islands, dogs and hogs being - unless rats were an exception - the only quadrupeds with which the human part of its inhabitants were acquainted, they had we may be well assured no denomination answering in point of extent to our word quadruped, still less to our word animal. When to their astonished eyes a horse first presented itself it was classed by them with dogs: it was designated among them by the same common and aggregating name. The hog species was as familiar to them as the dog: but from its being the name of dog and not that of hog that by them was bestowed upon the first-seen horse, it appears that in their eyes it was to the dog and not to the hog species that the horse bore the closest resemblance.

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