prejudices, which almost every where keep man in a state of infancy, and
which render him so little capable of either listening to reason or of
consulting truth. To judge by the slowness of his progress, by the
feebleness of his advance, in a number of respects, we should be
inclined to say, the human race has either just quitted its cradle, or
that he was never destined to attain the age of virility--to corroborate
his reason.

However it may be with these conjectures, whether the human race may
always have existed upon the earth, whether it may have been a recent
production of nature, whether the larger animals we now behold were
originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, who have
increased in bulk with the progression of time, or whether, as the
Egyptian philosophers thought, mankind were originally hermaphrodites,
who like the _aphis_ produced the sexual distinction after some
generations, which was also the opinion of Plato, and seems to have been
that of Moses, who was educated amongst these Egyptians, as may be
gathered from the 27th and 28th verses of the first chapter of GENESIS:
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created be
him; male and female created he them--And GOD blessed them, and GOD said
unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl
of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth:" it
is not therefore presuming too much to suppose, as the Egyptians were a
nation very fond of explaining their opinions by hieroglyphics, that
that part which describes Eve as taken out of Adam's rib, was an
hieroglyphic emblem: showing that mankind was in the primitive state of
both sexes, united, who was afterwards divided into males and females.
However, I say, this may be, it is extremely easy to recur to the origin
of many existing nations: we shall find them always in the savage state;