American heads and American hearts. We have drawn our intellectual sustenance, it is true, from noble fountains and crystal streams. We have all England, and all Europe for our fountain head. But when this has been said, we must add, that they have been off-sets from foreign fountains and foreign streams. And nurtured as we have been, from such ample sources, it is time, in the course of our national developments, that we begin to produce something characteristic of the land that gave us birth. No people can bear a true nationality, which does not exfoliate, as it were, from its bosom, something that expresses the peculiarities of its own soil and climate. In building its intellectual edifice, we must have not only suitable decorations, but there must come from the broad and deep quarries of its own mountains, foundation stones, and columns and capitals, which bear the impress of an indigenous mental geognosy. And where! when we survey the length and breadth of the land, can a more suitable element, for the work be found, than is furnished by the history and antiquities and institutions and love, of the free, bold, wild, independent, native hunter race? They are, relatively to us, what the ancient Pict and Celt were to Britain, or the Teuton, Goth and Magyar to Continental Europe. Looking around, over the wide forests, and transcendent lakes of New York, the founders of this association, have beheld the footprints of the ancient race. They saw here, as it were, in vision, the lordly Iroquois, crowned by the feathers of the eagle, bearing in his hand the bow and arrows, and scorning, as it were, by the keen glances of his black eye, and the loftiness of his tread, the very earth that bore him up. History and tradition speak of the story of this ancient race.--They paint him as a man of war--of endurance--of indomitable courage--of capacity to endure tortures without complaint--of a heroic and noble independence. They tell us that these precincts, now waving with yellow corn, and smiling with villages, and glittering with spires, were once vocal with their war songs, and resounded with the chorusses of their corn feasts. We descry, as we plough the plain, the well chipped darts which pointed their arrows, and the elongated pestles, that crushed their maize. We exhume from their obliterated and simple graves, the pipe of steatite, in which they smoked, and offered incense to these deities, and the fragments of the culinary vases, around which, the lodge circle gathered to their forest meal. Mounds and trenches and ditches, speak of the movement of tribe against tribe, and dimly shadow forth the overthrow of nations. There are no plated columns of marble; no tablets of inscribed stone--no gates of rust-coated brass. But the MAN himself survives, in his generation. He is a WALKING STATUE before us. His looks and his gestures and his language remain. And he is himself, an attractive _monument_ to be studied.