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and then abandoned to nature, on the contrary, is entirely homogeneous, often stinted to one or two, at most three kinds of timber. If the ground has been cultivated, the yellow locust will thickly spring up; if not cultivated, the black and white walnut will be the prevailing growth. Of what immense age then must be the works so often referred to, covered as they are by at least the second growth, after the primitive forest state was regained?' It is not undertaken to assign a period for the assimilation here indicated to take place. It must unquestionably, however, be measured by centuries."

The result of these and of all other investigations into the remains of ancient races and the relics of their arts and mechanical contrivances, is to show us how very ineagre and imperfect are the historic records which have been preserved of man. Men have, strangely enough, been oftener intent on learning the secrets of the stars than of the earth; and when they have turned their attention in more recent years to their own planet, it has been to search into the history of preadamite races, and not into the lost annals of man. The success which has

attended the curious inquiries of the geologist into the habits and character of races of beings which were extinct thousands of years ere the first man was called into being by the fiat of his Creator, ought to give a new stimulus to the researches, already begun, into the records of Adam's seed. The preceding chapters suffice to show how important a place these investigations are entitled to in the varied departments of human knowledge and study. To the biblical student they furnish ever new illustrations of the sacred records, fresh elucidations of their meaning, and fresh evidences of their truth. To the historian, they add to every department of his studies, enabling him to revise, correct, and extend the earliest historic records, and even to furnish a trustworthy and consistent history of nations that have passed away from

the great family of man, without apparently leaving the elements of a single authentic record. In this way the ruined temple and town may be peopled anew with historic life; the buried city may become the scene whereon ancient and long-forgotten story is re-enacted for our instruction; and past ages be recalled to furnish for us the great lessons taught by their wisdom, their sufferings, and even by their errors and their crimes. This is no less effectually shown in the relics of ancient civilization than of primitive simplicity or imperfectly developed arts; and will be found even more powerful in exciting our sympathy and interest, now that we turn to the antiquities of our own continent and the memorials of our historic fathers.

PART IV.-EUROPE

CHAPTER I.

THE TEMPLES OF GREECE.

Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground;
No earth of thine is lost in vulgar mould,
But one vast realm of wonder spreads around,
And all the muse's tales seem truly told,

Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold
Defies the power which crushed thy temples gone:
Age shakes Athena's Tower, but spares grey Marathon.
CHILDE HAROLD.

WE are naturally less inclined to associate our own country and race with the present than the past, and pursue our investigations into its primitive history rather as a means of illustrating modern customs and events, than from the spirit of curiosity which incites our inquiries into evidences of primeval history. It is with a spirit somewhat akin to this that we turn to the ruins of ancient Europe, after having explored those of Asia and Africa, and even of that strange continent on which the novelty of re-discovery has conferred the title of the New World. The usual course of modern education largely tends to increase this feeling. Familiarized as we are,

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from early studies, with the literature, history, and the social habits of the Greeks and Romans, we cannot learn to look upon them as peopling a remote antiquity like that of the Egyptian or Assyrian nations, or even of the Phoenician and Carthagenian colonists, through whom Greece and Rome, and even, as we believe, Britain, learned some of the earliest useful arts.

Turner observes in the early part of his Anglo-Saxon history: "That the re-peopling of a globe which is nearly twenty-four thousand miles in circumference, should have been immediately effected, no reflecting mind will suppose; and the slow progress which population must have made over so large a surface, could not but be more gradual from the mountains, deserts, lakes, woods, and rivers, which divide its various regions, and obstruct human

access.

"The impenetrable forests, ever increasing from the vegetative agencies of nature, till checked by human labour; and the continual and deleterious marshes, which rain and rivers are, every year, producing and enlarging in all uninhabited countries, must have long kept mankind from spreading rapidly, or numerously, beyond their first settlements. These seem generally to have been made along the inland rivers, or on the maritime shores of the earth. Almost every where the high mountains are uninhabited, while the valleys and the plains abound with towns and villages.

"No ancient history exhibits mankind as first inhabiting Europe. Although this is now the most important part of our globe, it was once to Asia what the Americas were, until the last three centuries, to us—an unknown, and unexplored world. All the records of human transactions in the earliest times of our knowledge agree with the Mosaic, and with the researches of modern science and antiquarian curiosity, to place the commencement of population, art, and knowledge, in the eastern

portions of the earth. multiplied; and from hence progressively spread into those wilder and ruder districts, where nature was living in all her unmolested, but dreary, vacant, and barbarous majesty."

Here men first appeared and

This interesting confirmation of sacred story has already been abundantly illustrated in preceding sections; while we have found that even the antiquities of the American continent assume so singular and unfamiliar an aspect, when investigated with a view to the illustration of primitive history, that it becomes a conceivable thing to look upon the primeval aborigines of America as already establishing their locations amid its forests, while the first Asiatic nomades were passing onward into the younger continent, which forms the chief seat of modern civilization. Behind each there lay the Asiatic plains, and the contiguous Nile valley, the established seats of arts and social refinements, while the wanderers of the great human family passed onward to privations, and, for a time at least,-frequently including in it many generations, to increasing barbarism, and the utter extinction of many useful arts, altogether incompatible with the nomadic state. Yet it was a change indispensable to new developments. From these very barbarian nomades have sprung the modern originators of a civilization far beyond that which was lost to their primitive forefathers. "It was impossible for any portion of the civilized population of the world to wander from their domestic localities, and to penetrate far into these unpeopled regions, without changing the character and habits of their minds, or without being followed by a progeny, still more dissimilar to everything which they had quitted. In some, the alteration was a deteriorating process, declining successively into absolute barbarism. But in the far greater number it became rather peculiarity than perversion, and a peculiarity not without beneficial

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