brought upon themselves. It is the clashing of religious faiths which has put the extinguisher on Asiatic progress, annihilated her enterprise, and set her in her present isolation. Still this barrier is not absolutely settled and for all time, but already it shows that it is capable of some modification. The politico-religious system of the Chinese is rending under our eyes; the old bonds which Mohammedanism once laid on Asia are now sensibly relaxed. The great highways of travel through the country of the Euphrates and Tigris and the extended archæological investigations of modern times have operated mediatorially between Europe and Asia; while steam navigation on the Danube has brought Turkey, a hitherto undissolved Asiatic element in European life, into closer relations with the great powers of the West. The great missionary enterprise, too, of modern times, has been laboring to remould the ideas of the Asiatic nations, while navigation has operated on the material and more appreciable interests of commerce and industry. There are no possible limits to be assigned to the perfectibility of the globe as the abode of man; no possible bounds to his enterprise. The construction of a canal through the Isthmus of Panama would bring the eastern coast of Asia seven thousand miles nearer than it is now to the Atlantic shores of America and Europe. By saving the mere doubling of Cape Horn, one-third of the periphery of the globe would be annihilated, so far as the labor and expense of navigation are concerned. North America would nearly double its resources when its Atlantic and Pacific coasts stand in close connection and interdependence. The projected canal at Suez would exercise an unbounded influence over Asia in binding it anew to Europe. The building of highways through the passes of the Ural, the Caucasus, and Himalayas is yet to be accomplished; and only now are great roads constructing over the Rocky Mountains, welding North America together. The construction of railways on the high plateaus of central Africa will transform that vast undeveloped district, so rich in resources for the future. The changes which art is yet to effect on our globe are beyond all possible computation, and it might be said, beyond any possible exaggeration.