"The progress of the race," says the German psychologist Rauch, "has ever been against the rotation of the earth, and toward the setting sun;" as though it were in obedience to some natural law common to all planets that revolve upon their axes. We may reject this as fanciful; and yet there are some reasons why the primitive roaming tendency, or spirit of discovery, should have taken one direction rather than another--reasons grounded, not on any direct physiological magnetism, but upon the effect of certain outward phenomena on the course of human thought. Especially may we believe in some such influence as existing in that young and impressible period, when an unchanging direction may be rationally supposed to have been derived from the first faintest impressions, either upon the sense or the intelligence. To the early musing, meditative mind, the setting, rather than the ascending or meridian sun, would most naturally connect itself with the ideas of the vast and the undiscovered--the remote, legendary land, where the light goes down so strangely behind the mountains, or on the other side of the seemingly boundless plain, or beyond the deserts' solitary waste, or away on the ocean wave, as it grows dim in the misty horizon, or presents in its vanishing outline the far-off, shadowy isle. The darkness, too, that follows, would nourish the same feeling of mysterious interest, and thus aid in giving rise to that impulse, which, when once originated, maintains itself afterward by its own onward self-determining energy.