A great deal of time and much temper have been wasted, in disputes concerning the native country of the arts. China, Upper India, and Egypt, have been perhaps the favourites of the learned, though there have not been wanting champions for the claims of Western Asia, and even Greece. But, if we could trace all the arts, whether springing from the primary wants, or the mere desires and wishes of man, to one original inventor, we should not be much the forwarder. As mankind increased, and formed separate nations, these arts would naturally and necessarily vary, in order to accommodate themselves to climates and circumstances. And we are as little likely to fix, with any thing like certainty, on the native country of painting or sculpture, as to discover that of the various kinds of grain, which in all ages have formed the principal food of civilized men. The discovery of the great Western World, long enough after the art of printing, to secure whatever memorials might be written concerning the state of its inhabitants, opened to us a monument of the early condition of all mankind, a thousand times more instructive than pillars of marble or of brass. The Spaniards found in Florida one species of grain, cultivated and used for bread, in the same way, and in as much ignorance of its origin, as wheat in the Old World: and in many provinces, a substitute for the finer grains was used, requiring infinitely more ingenuity in its preparation, and of the origin of which the natives knew so little, as to look upon it as the gift of a benevolent enchanter[3]. In Mexico and Peru they found many arts considerably advanced. The smelting, casting, embossing, engraving of metals; the making of very fine pottery; the chiselling of the hardest stones and marbles. There, too, was painting practised, not as a mere luxury, but as a matter of prime necessity. For the nations were still so young as not to have discovered alphabetical writing; therefore, painting, mixed with a variety of conventional signs, almost amounting to hieroglyphic characters, was used, to record the history of the nations, the transactions of the priests and merchants, and the decisions of the laws[4]. Since that great first discovery, many and various tribes have been gradually revealed to us, none so savage as not to have discovered some longing after arts, beyond those absolutely necessary to existence. The cloth of the Sandwich Islander was stamped with mimic leaves and branches. The clubs, darts, and hatchets of the New Zealanders were covered with flowers and foliage; and not unfrequently we find on them an attempt at the human form. The fences of the Morais presented, on many of the poles, a human head, grossly cut indeed, but still bearing the impress of man’s imitative genius.