But history, as we now understand the term, is more than a bare record of what men have done and suffered. It aims to point out the connection of events with one another. It seeks to explain the causes and the consequences of things that occur. It would trace the steps that mark the progress of the race, and of the different portions of it, through extended periods. It brings to light the thread which unites each particular stage in the career of a people, or of mankind as a whole, with what went before, and with what came after. NATIONS.--History has been called "the biography of a society." Biography has to do with the career of an individual. History is concerned with the successive actions and fortunes of a community; in its broadest extent, with the experiences of the human family. It is only when men are connected by the social bond, and remain so united for a greater or less period, that there is room for history. It is, therefore, with nations, in their internal progress and in their mutual relations, that history especially deals. Of mere clans, or loosely organized tribes, it can have little to say. History can go no farther than to explore their genealogy, and state what were their journeyings and habits. The nation is a form of society that rests on the same basis--a basis at once natural and part of a divine system--as the family. By a nation is meant a people dwelling in a definite territory, living under the same government, and bound together by such ties as a common language, a common religion, the same institutions and customs. The elements that enter into that national spirit which is the bond of unity, are multiple. They vary to a degree in different peoples. As individuals are not alike, and as the history of any particular community is modified and molded by these individual differences, so the course of the history of mankind is shaped by the peculiar characteristics of the various nations, and by their interaction upon one another. In like manner, groups of nations, each characterized by distinctive traits derived from affinities of race or of religion, or from other sources, act on each other, and thus help to determine the course of the historic stream.