There is another period--we allude to the Horitic element--in the obscurity of the early history of the continent, which may be here mentioned, but from the diversity of the sub-elements which enter into it, some hesitancy exists in giving it a name. In order to secure the purposes of generalization, and include every element of which it is composed, it may be called, provisionally, the MEDITERRANEAN PERIOD. It is the earliest and most obscure of the whole, relying, as it does, almost exclusively upon passages of the imaginative literature of Greece. Yet it is a subject eminently worthy of the pen of original investigation. It includes the consideration of the early maritime power of the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Carthaginians, and other celebrated nations and cities who, long before the Christian era, drew the attention and governed the destinies of the world. It was in this quarter of the globe, forming, as it does, the cementing point between Europe and Asia, that an alphabet arose at a very early day, and prior to that of Greece or Rome, which consisted almost exclusively of straight or angular marks. From its use it has sometimes been called the Rock Alphabet. It has its equivalents in the more full and exact Hebrew and Greek characters, so far as the old alphabet extended. It had, as these changes progressed and the family of man spread, the various names of Phoenician, Ostic, Etruscan, Punic, ancient Greek and Gallic, Celtiberic, Runic, Druidical and others. As a system of notation, it appears to occupy an epoch between the hieroglyphic system of Egypt and the Greek alphabet. But whatever may be said of its origin, affinities, changes, or character, it is clear that this simple alphabet spread westward among the barbaric nations of Europe, changing, in some measure, in its forms of notation and the articulate sounds it represented, until it reached the utmost limits of its western and northern coasts and islands. Here it served as the means of recording human utterance, until it was supplanted and obliterated by the civilization of Rome and the Roman alphabet. To decypher the ancient inscriptions in this simple character, found upon rocks and monuments, is an object, at this day, of learned research; and its importance may be judged of by observing, that, whenever successfully effected, it is a literal restoration, to the present age, of the lost sounds of those parts of the ancient world. I will no farther allude to this period, so important in its means of research, than to add, that the inscription, found in 1838, on opening the gigantic pile of earth, or tumulus, heretofore referred to, on the alluvial plains of Grave Creek in Western Virginia, was in one of the types of this ancient character. This type of the alphabet may be called AONIC[6]--a term derived from the aboriginal vocabulary. I visited the locality in 1843--carefully examined the facts, and having satisfied myself of the