"And God said--Let there be lights in the firmament of Heaven, and let them be for days, and for years, and for times, and for seasons." It requires some thought before we can fully realize how much we are indebted, morally and mentally, as well as physically, to these time-measuring arrangements. We must place ourselves in the condition of the savage before we can know how much of our civilization comes from the almanac, or, in other words, our exact divisions of time aiding the idea and the memory--thus shaping our knowledge, or thinking, and even our emotions, so as to make them very different from what they might have been, had we not possessed these regulators of our inner as well as our outer man. How unlike, in all this, must be the life of the untaught children of the forest! Let us endeavor to fancy men living from age to age without any known length or divisions of the year--no lesser or greater periods to serve as landmarks, or, rather, sky-marks, in their history--and, therefore, without any possibility of really having any history. Summer and winter come and go, but to the savage all the future is a chaos, and all the past is With the years beyond the flood, unmarked by any intervals which may give it a hold upon the thoughts or the memory. The heavenly bodies make their monthly, and annual, and cyclical revolutions, but their eternal order finds no correspondence in his chaotic experience. The stars roll nightly over his head, but only to direct his steps in the wilderness, without shedding a ray of light upon the denser wilderness of his dark and sensual mind. The old man knows not how many years he has lived. He knows not the ages of his children. He has heard, indeed, of the acts of his fathers; but all are equally remote. They belong to the past, and the past is all alike--a dark back-ground of tradition, without any of that chronological perspective through which former ages look down upon us with an aspect as life-like and as truthful as the present. The phenomena of the physical world have been ever flitting like shadows before his sense, but the understanding has never _connected_ them with their causes, never followed them to their sources, never seen in them any ground of coherence or relation, simply because time, the great _connective_ medium of all inductive comparison, has been to him an undivided, unarranged, and, therefore, unremembered vacancy. Hence it is, he never truly learns to think, and, on this account, never makes progress--never rises of himself from that low animal state to which he may once have fallen, in his ever downward course from the primitive light and truth. AEschylus, in the Prometheus, makes such to have been the first condition of mankind. But, however false his theory in this respect--opposed as it is to the sure teachings of revelation--nothing can be truer to the life than the fancy picture he has given us--