We come now to those important questions which Mr. Wilson was not, indeed, the first to agitate, but which he has awakened from their profound slumbers in the bosom of the Hon. Lewis Cass and the pages of the "North American Review." We are not to be tempted into writing another "New History of the Conquest of Mexico"; but we shall endeavor to state with clearness those points on which the world has had the temerity to differ from the "high authorities" we have named. It has been, then, commonly asserted, and is, we fear, by the great mass of our readers still superstitiously believed, that, at the time of the discovery of this continent, there existed, in certain portions of it, nations not wholly barbarous, and yet not civilized, according to our notions of that term,--nations which had regular governments and systems of polity, many correct notions in regard to morals, and some acquaintance with Art and with the refinements of life,--but which were yet, in a great measure, ignorant of the true principles of science, little skilled in mechanics, and addicted to the practice of idolatrous rites. This assertion would seem to have some _primâ-facie_ evidence in its favor. The regions in which these nations are said to have existed lie within the tropics; and it is a well-established principle, that a genial climate, a fertile soil, the consequent facilities for obtaining a subsistence, and the stimulus thus given to the increase of population, are the first elements of an advance from a savage to a civilized state, of the abandonment of rude freedom and nomadic habits, and of the development of a regular social system. This principle is clearly set forth and elaborately illustrated by Mr. Buckle; and we the more readily refer to this author, because he stands high in the esteem of Mr. Wilson, who, in order to prove his own especial fitness for historical composition, and the incompetence of all who have preceded him in the attempt, refers to a passage in Buckle, containing an enumeration of the qualifications which he considers indispensable for the historian. This enumeration includes all the attainments that have ever been in the common possession of the human family. Mr. Buckle remarks, with indisputable truth, that one historian has lacked some of these qualifications, another historian has lacked others of them. Mr. Wilson states that "each and every writer" who has preceded him has lacked them all. Mr. Buckle, by implication, excepts one person, as uniting in himself all the qualifications he demands. Mr. Wilson thinks _he_ is the exception; but we are quite sure that the exception intended by the author was--Henry Thomas Buckle.