The idea that in ancient times there existed a lost civilisation boasting both an ideal social order and profound knowledge of the natural world has an enduring appeal, from Plato's Atlantis in the fourth century bc to the popular pseudo-archaeology of Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock in the late twentieth century. It is not, however, an idea normally associated with the nineteenth century, an era often typified as having made a quasi-religion of progress. It was, after all, the age of the steam engine, the telegraph and the explosive growth of new industrial metropolises. As David Spadafora has written, ‘[d]uring the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, in particular, the belief in progress was widespread and sometimes seemed virtually unchallenged’. In this chapter I will show that belief in degeneration was in fact alive and well in the early nineteenth century in the very country that had been central to the development of the progressivist theories of conjectural history during the Enlightenment.

As Steven Shapin has pointed out, it was widely taken for granted by early modern people that ‘the ancients had better knowledge, and more potent technology, than that possessed by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or than any modern human beings could have’. In his classic account of degenerationism, Victor Harris has traced the idea that the history of the world was a story of decay and decline through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. According to Harris, ‘[t]he belief that the world is decaying, that man has reached the lowest point in his corrupt and sinful history, that the end of all is on hand, is almost universally accepted by the second or third decade of the seventeenth century’. However, Harris also claimed that after around 1635 ‘the belief in the natural corruption of the world ceased to be significant’. Spadafora dates the decline of degenerationism somewhat later, claiming that ‘the extent of historical pessimism … began to wane with the end of the Augustan age in the 1730s and diminished substantially after about 1760’, as the idea of pro-gress became ‘the dominant element in the historical outlook of the high eighteenth century’. However, degenerationism had not in fact disappeared forever, but lingered on into the late eighteenth century in Scotland before seeing a striking resurgence in the early nineteenth century.