In preparing these articles on the homologies of Radiates, I have felt the difficulty of divesting my subject of the technicalities which cling to all scientific results, until they are woven into the tissue of our every-day knowledge and assume the familiar garb of our common intellectual property. When the forms of animals are as familiar to children as their A, B, C, and the intelligent study of Natural History, from the objects themselves, and not from text-books alone, is introduced into all our schools, we shall have popular names for things that can now only be approached with a certain professional stateliness on account of their technical nomenclature. The best result of such familiarity with Nature will be the recognition of an intellectual unity holding together all the various forms of life as parts of one Creative Conception. [Footnote 3: See lower wood-cut, p. 294, _d_.] [Footnote 4: Those who care to know more of the habits and structure of these animals will find more detailed descriptions of all the various species, illustrated by numerous plates, in the fourth volume of my _Contributions to the Natural History of the United States,_ just published.] GABRIEL'S DEFEAT. In exploring among dusty files of newspapers for the true records of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, I have caught occasional glimpses of a plot perhaps more wide in its outlines than that of either, which has lain obscure in the darkness of half a century, traceable only in the political events which dated from it, and the utter incorrectness of the scanty traditions which assumed to preserve it. And though researches in public libraries have only proved to me how rapidly the materials for American history are vanishing,--since not one of our great institutions possesses, for instance, a file of any Southern newspaper of the year 1800,--yet the little which I have gained may have an interest which makes it worth preserving. I have never been able to see why American historians should be driven to foreign lands for subjects, when our own nation has furnished tyrannies more terrible than that of Philip of Spain, and heroes more silent than William of Orange,--or why our novelists must seek themes in Italy, on the theory avowed by one of the most gifted of their number, that this country is given over to a "broad commonplace prosperity," and harbors "no picturesque or gloomy wrong." But since, as the Spanish proverb says, no man can at the same time ring the bells and walk in the procession, so it has perhaps happened that those most qualified to record the romance of slave-institutions have been thus far too busy in dealing with the reality.