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Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 18, Issue 1170, 13 November 1871, Page 2

The Italian Opera Company are performing with great success in Auckland. The New Zealand Herald understands that Messrs. Shaw, Sayille and Co. have forwarded by the ship City of Auckland their usual silver cup, to be competed for at the forthcoming Auckland gattaA. ship canal in Salem, New Jersey,. which was projected 75 years ago, is. now approaching completion. It extends from the Delaware River to Salem Creek. The canal for one half the proposed distance was completed in, 1812, but for some reason it was abandoned until last year. Canon Kingsley, in presiding lately at the inaugural meeting of ihe Devonshire Association for the advancement of science, took occasion to advise his hearers, as scientific men, not to be in a hurry to assent to " certain modern hypotheses as to the human race. These, while he does not say they are altogether true, he regards as not yet proven. With reference to the question, " Did man start from a condition anything like that of a modern savage ?" he said : " I am well aware of the learned and able books which have been written of late asserting that he did so. I shall speak of them only with respect, Their authors have earnestly sought for, and honestly studied, these T fully accept the immense antiquity of the human race. But the more ancient you confess the human race to be, the more time you allow for whole peoples to have risen, become great, strong, civilized; and the more time too for whole peoples to have fallen again, and become weak, base, barbarous. For civilization may fall as well as rise. Those who talk of a continual progress upward in man forget how many facts are against them. ' Has Greece risen or fallen in the last two thousand years? Has Spain risen or fallen during the last hundred years? Has the whole East risen or fallen in the last thousand years 1 In America alone have not two great civilizations, that of Mexico and that of Peru, sunk into savngerv again during the last three hundred years? If I am to believe (as 1 think we must now believe) that the human race is of immense antiquiiy., then T shall see more likelihood, more reasonableness,, in those magnificent Arab legends ot whole dynasties ot pre-Adamite and all the gorgeous tables of greatness and glory of which the East is full, than in the theory that mai* crawled on as a savage, or semi-savage for countless ages,''