The ancestors of the Egyptians, when they entered the valley of the Nile, did not come either empty-handed, or empty-headed. They brought with them their looms, their ploughs and seed-corn, and their sheep and cattle: for what they had been used to in the old home was what they would wish to have in the new. They did this whether they came by land or by sea. None of the first European settlers in the New World found any difficulty in carrying with them their live stock across the broad and stormy Atlantic. They brought with them also, and which was of more importance than all the rest, their belief in an after life. We are as certain of this, whether they came in ten, or twenty thousand years ago, as we are that, at a geological epoch so remote from the present time that the organized life of the Earth has since been changed again and again, there were winds and tides, and sunshine and rain. Every branch of the Aryan family, from the Ganges to the Thames, participated in this belief; it had, therefore, existed among them at a date anterior to their dispersion. It occupied in their organized thought the position the vertebrate skeleton does in the animal organization. It was the governing idea. Everything contributed to it, or was deduced from it: either, went to feed it, or grew out of it. Those races of animals which have not arrived at vertebration are the lowest forms, with the fewest specialized organs: still they appear to have a kind of tendency towards it, or virtual capacity for it. Just so of the mental condition of some portions of our race with respect to this idea of a future life. There are some whose thought is so rudimentary that it has never yet grown into this form; but they are the lowest minds: still, even they have a kind of tendency towards it, and of capacity for it—though, indeed, several such tribes and people have died out without ever having attained to it. And so will it be with many of those who, at the present day, are in this condition. They will be swept away by those who possess the higher form of organized thought, without their ever reaching this point in the progress of moral and intellectual being.