By comparison with London, New York is a city of the second size, lacking some millions of the population of the modern Babylon. Even Paris, though less populous, outranks the American metropolis in many of the elements that go to the making of a great city. But in drawing these comparisons it must be remembered that only three centuries ago, when the French and English capitals had been places of importance for over a thousand years, New York was a wooded island, criss-crossed by innumerable streams, indented by morasses and infested by Indians and wild beasts. European civilization was wrinkled with age long before a permanent roof was erected on the island of Manhattan; and three lives such as that of ex-Mayor Tiemann, who died here in his ninety-fifth year, in the summer of 1899, would have spanned the entire history of the town from the Dutch discovery to the reign of Richard Croker. The first white man’s habitation in what is now New York was a grave; for the crew of Hudson’s _Half-Moon_, after their fight with the aborigines on the mainland above Spuyten Duyvil Creek, in September, 1609, buried their dead before sailing homeward from their voyage of discovery up the great river named for their commander. [Illustration: FIRST SEAL OF CITY. 1623-1654.] Four temporary dwellings, presumably little better than wigwams, housed Skipper Block and the crew of the _Tiger_ near the lower end of the island, while they rebuilt their burned vessel, during the winter of 1613-14. The site of the present city was bought from the Indians on May 6, 1626, for trinkets worth sixty guilders, or four-and-twenty dollars—less than one tenth of the rate paid a few years since for a single square foot of land. Building was begun at once and pushed with vigor. Fort Amsterdam—a blockhouse partly shielded by palisades—marked the extreme southern limit of the island; and the first bark-roofed cottages were clustered close together under its harmless, necessary guns. A warehouse with stone walls and a thatched roof sprang up as soon as a stronghold had been built; and a horse-mill, with a loft fitted up for the simplest form of religious services. [Illustration: MAP OF ORIGINAL GRANTS.] Fort Amsterdam was a fortress in name only. Scarcely had it been completed when it began to fall into disrepair; and the pigs were forever rooting in its sodded earthworks, and threatening its very foundations. Thus early was it that these four-footed scavengers made their appearance in the history of New York, playing as picturesque, though not as patriotic, a part therein as that of the legendary Roman geese. Not till well forward in the present century did they disappear from the streets and the annals of the city.