Indeed, in our chronic modesty, we are allowing our country to get somewhat mature in speaking of itself as new; while even children now know that ours is, in fact, the elder continent. Agassiz is not gassing us when he picks our ancient Alleghany flints and tells us, that the camp-fires in the Lackawanna, Schuylkill, and Lehigh valleys blazed away long before those at Newcastle and in the English Black Country were lit up. The Rocky Mountains got up their vertebrated backs ages before Mont Blanc put on such cool airs and carried its head so loftily over the more modest chignon of our Orizaba and Long’s Peak. The Mississippi got down to its delta long before the Rhone or Rhine reached even their alpha. Let us then henceforth assert the dignity of our superior antiquity; and commiserate the other half of the globe in being so long unknown to our older America. What was the precise height, the fashionable color of hair and eyes, the modish vices, the sartorial virtues, of the races which stocked our prairies, and hunted plesiosauria, and megalosauria, and other tall game along our wide valleys, and across the granite peaks of our long mountain ranges, we have not now at hand any plates or photographs to show; but well do we know that we are very much obliged to them for leaving unburned such lots of good coal, snugly stowed away in dry, ample cellars; and that those cellars were placed in such a peaceable Quaker State as Pennsylvania, where we can go and help ourselves by the cart-load without getting into a stew. How beautifully, too, they—those young Americans—packed away their fish; so well that they—the fish—are now just as fresh as when Noah performed his maritime adventure, Moses was fished up by the banks of the Nile, or Jonah became cargo in the deeply laden whale.