Our notice of this work would, however, be both incomplete and unjust, did we forbear to say, that, in its avowed idea, the author has got hold of a genuine analogy. Not that we approve the details of his scheme; the details, we verily believe, are as nearly all wrong as an able and studious man could make them. But the general idea of a correspondence between individual and social life, of an organic existence in civilizations and a consequent subjection to the law of organisms, is a rich mine, and one that will sooner or later be worked to profit. And the definite, emphatic announcement of it in Dr. Draper's work, however awkwardly done, suffices to make the work one of grave importance. Every system of civilization is in some degree special. None is universal; none represents purely the spirit of humanity; none contains all the possibilities of society. Not being universal, none can be, in its form, perpetual. The universal asserts its supremacy; all that is partial must be temporary. The human spirit takes back, as it were, into its bosom each sally of civilization before pulsing anew. Thus, even on their ideal side, civilizations have their law of limitation; and to know what this law of limitation definitely is constitutes now one of the great _desiderata_ of the world. We believe, that, _ceteris paribus_, the duration of a civilization is proportioned to its depth and breadth,--that is, to the degree in which it represents the total resource and possibility of the human spirit. Again, every system of civilization has a body, an institution, an established and outward interpretation of social relationship. In respect to this it is mortal. In respect to this it has a law of growth and decay. In respect to this, moreover, it is subject to what we call accident, the chances of the world. In fine, the bodies of individuals and of civilizations, the fixed forms, that is, in which they are instituted, serve the same uses and obey the same law. Now a work which should deal in a really great and profound way with this _corpus_ of civilizations,--not spending itself in a mere tedious, endless demonstration that such _corpus_ exists, and has therefore its youth and its age, but really explaining its physiology and pathology,--such a work would be no less than a benefaction to the human race. And in such a work one of the easiest and most obvious points would be this,--that the spirit of civilizations has a certain power of changing the form of its body by successive partial rejections and remouldings; and the degree in which they prove capable of this continuous _palingenesia_ is one important measure of their depth and determinant of their duration.