1. We all know how long, in families which have lost position or power, the memory of former greatness is cherished. You will find in your charitable institutions, in the depths of poverty, and, perhaps, of wickedness, those who will tell you by the hour of the fortunes of their house in remote days, of the distinction which some ancestor, far removed, conferred upon the name. Such memories are preserved with care, and transmitted from generation to generation, and they become more and more precious as the descendants themselves have less and less honor of their own. The same principle operates with nations and with the great tribes of men, particularly when they have themselves sunk so low that they are conscious of no ground of glorying in themselves. Now it is an instructive fact that the traditions of all nations have more or less reference to a golden age, from which men have fallen. This is true in India, in China, in Egypt, among our own Indians, among the inhabitants of Central and South America—wherever traditional knowledge is preserved. It is a vague memory—nevertheless a memory cherished by the race, handed down through the ages, not of an era when humanized monkeys rejoiced in their promotion, but of a golden age, when men as gods dwelt upon the earth. The only explanation of such a wide-spread tradition is that there must have been a fact corresponding to it; there must have been a substance to cast this shadow over so many generations. Those who hold that mankind began at the lowest point, can not satisfactorily account for this tradition of the race.