Such, briefly considered, is an imperfect summary or outline of the history of our race, the only race that has a history or that is capable of those mental manifestations whose record constitutes history. It is a favorite theory of most historians to represent the mental development of the race as divided into distinct categories, not as the author has ventured, into historic periods, but into different phases of intellectual manifestation. They have supposed that men (white men) were first hunters and lived wholly by the chase—that after a while they became shepherds, and lived on their herds or flocks—that then they made another advance and became cultivators, and finally artisans, merchants, etc. Each of these conditions, it has been supposed, were dependent on, or were associated with, a corresponding mental development. The hunter had intellect enough to run down the stag or wit sufficient to entrap the game necessary for his support, but had not sufficient capacity to take care of his flocks or sense sufficient to till the earth! This notion has doubtless arisen from observing the habits of the subordinate races of men, though it is quite possible that our own race has passed through some such stages as those suggested. But there has never been any variations in its actual intellectual powers. The mental capacities given it in the morning of creation were just what they are now, and what they will be millions of years hence. Thus is explained the (to many persons) seeming anomaly that in the very dawn of history there were men like Homer, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, and others, with a breadth and depth of intellect corresponding to the most intellectual men of our own times. Mental power, like physical strength, remains always the same through all ages and mutations of human society, while knowledge, or the uses made of the intellectual forces, is constantly varying from age to age, and changing from one country to another. The miserable Italian organ-grinder under our window, it is somewhat difficult to suppose, embodies the high intellect and powerful will, which two thousand years ago, made his ancestors masters of the world, but such is the fact, however latent, unknown or unfelt by himself may be these powers. The amount or extent or degrees of knowledge, the perceptions of external things, their relations, the laws that govern them, their uses, their influences on our well-being or the contrary, in short, our capacities for acquiring knowledge, for comprehending ourselves and the things about us, are limitless, and therefore progress and indefinite perfectibility are the specific attributes of the Caucasian. Each generation applies its capabilities and acquires a certain amount of knowledge which the succeeding one is heir to, and which, in turn, transmits its acquisition to those following; thus its march is ever onward, and except during the “dark ages” it is believed