What large provisions those jolly dwellers on this hemisphere, long ages ago, must have made, when we find such abundance of funny finny things, so carefully stowed away in layers, all over the continent, from the icy plains around the North Pole, down through the Isthmus belt, and along the saw-shaped ridges of South America, to the farthermost cape. Now, if we had no other proof of the high civilization, we may truthfully say, the dainty and luxurious refinement, of those pre-Columbian inhabitants of this hemisphere, the existence of these fish, so beautifully canned,—better disposed, in fact, than if they had been arranged in layers by the accomplished herring-packers of Scotland or Holland,—we might safely rest there the well-digested argument; knowing well, as all our readers do, that the love of fish was one of the peculiar features that marked the highest point of Assyrian, Egyptian, and Persian civilization; remembering that in the time of Pericles, the polished Athenian left the charming music of his flowing speech, when he heard the bell in the Agora announce that the fish auction had begun; and further recalling the fact that the fish-ponds of Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, and the millionnaire Romans, gauged, like yard-sticks, the intellectual culture of Rome. Fossil cranes have also been found ingeniously tucked away in appropriate crusts,—a cran-iological development not to be overlooked; although upon this head we forbear to enlarge. The Hadrosaurus—now restored to us by strangely unsubstantial Water-house Hawkins—shows that in his (i. e. the former H.’s) production what countless ages must have been exhausted and for his sustenance what numberless lives consumed, which, if unslaughtered, might have gone on, and after centuries of growth developed to be not only men, but even American voters. [Illustration: TIME STOCKING AMERICA. (p. 59) ] “Perhaps in scaly armor, up and down those ancient seas, Roamed he with an appetite that nothing could appease; Crushing shoals and hosts of being, every one of whom that ran Would, in course of time and season, have developed up to man; But _fata sic profulgent_, and we only may bewail Our dear relations slaughtered when this monster curled his tail.” From what has already been said it is clear that many of the aboriginal settlers in this half of the world died game to the last. After mention of these higher arguments of our elder civilization, we shall not weaken the proofs by an exhibition of later American antiquities, such as the sculptured temples found in Yucatan and Central America; the time-coated, swallow-tailed fanes of the Peruvians; the exaggerated structures of the dwarfed Aztecs; or the tall earth-mounds which, scattered from Lake Erie through the Mississippi Valley, and forced through the tight-set lips of the Isthmus, are at last swallowed up by Venezuela.