One of the most curious and interesting results of that eclectic spirit which has brought into suggestive relations the different spheres of human knowledge and inquiry, is the application of geographical facts to historical interpretation. The comprehensive researches of Ritter and the scientific expositions of Humboldt enable us to recognize the vast influence of local conditions upon social development, and to account for the peculiar traits of special civilization by the distribution of land and water, and the agency of climate and position. In the calm retrospect of the present crisis of our national history, when the philosopher takes the place of the partisan and the exciting incidents of the present are viewed in the chastened light of the past, it will be seen and felt that a kind of poetical justice and moral necessity made Virginia the scene of civil and physical strife. Of all the States, she represents, both in her annals and her resources, her scenery, and her social character, the average national characteristics: natives of each section of the land find within her limits congenial facts of life and nature, of manners and industry: like her Southern sisters, she has known all the consequences of slavery--but at certain times and places, free labor has thriven; commerce and agriculture, the miner, the mariner, the tradesman, not less than the planter, found therein scope for their respective vocations; the life of the sea coast, of the mountains, and of the interior valleys--the life of the East, West, and Middle States was there reproduced in juxtaposition with that of the South. Nowhere in the land could the economist more distinctly trace the influence of free and slave labor upon local prosperity: nowhere has the aristocratic element been more intimately in contact with the democratic. Her colonial record indicates a greater variety in the original population than any other province: she has given birth to more eminent statesmen, has been the arena of more fierce conflicts of opinion, and is associated most directly with problems of government, of society, and of industrial experiment. On her soil were first landed African captives; and when the curse thus entailed was dying out, it was renewed and aggravated by the inducement to breed slaves for the cotton and sugar plantations. From Virginia flowed the earliest stream of immigration to the West, whereby a new and mighty political element was added to the Republic: there are some of the oldest local memorials of American civilization: for a long period she chiefly represented Southern life and manners to the North: placed between the extremes of climate--producing the staples of all the States, except those bordering on the Gulf--earlier colonized, prominent in legislation, fruitful in eminent men, she was more visited by travellers, more written about, better known, and therefore gathered to and grafted upon herself more of