restore to light memorials of Europe’s early youth, they are startled with affinities to the ancient historic nations, in language, arts, and rites, no less than by the recovered traces of an unfamiliar past. But it is altogether different with the New World which Columbus revealed. Superficial students of its monuments have indeed misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to the infantile instincts common to human thought, into fancied analogies with the arts of Egypt; and more than one ingenious philosopher has traced out affinities with the mythology and astronomical science of the ancient East; but the western continent still stands a world apart, with a peculiar people, and with languages, arts, and customs essentially its own. To whatever source the American nations may be traced, they had remained shut in for unnumbered centuries by ocean barriers from all the influences of the historic hemisphere. Yet there the first European explorers found man so little dissimilar to all with which they were already familiar, that the name of Indian originated in the belief, retained by the great cosmographer to the last, that the American continent was no new world, but only the eastern confines of Asia. Such, then, is a continent where man may be studied under circumstances which seem to furnish the best guarantee of his independent development. No reflex light of Grecian or Roman civilisation has guided him on his way. The great sources of religious and moral suasion which have given form to medieval and modern Europe, and so largely influenced the polity and culture of Asia, and even of Africa, were effectually excluded; and however prolonged the period of occupation of the western hemisphere by its own American nations may have been, man is still seen there in a condition which seems to reproduce some of the most familiar phases ascribed to the infancy of the unhistoric world. The records of its childhood are not obscured, as in Europe, by later chroniclings; where, in every attempt to decipher the traces of an earlier history, we have to spell out a nearly obliterated palimpsest. Amid the simplicity of its palæography, the aphorism, by which alone the Roman could claim to be among the world’s ancient races acquires a new force: “antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi.”