Probably no event of comparatively modern times--certainly none in our history--has occurred so extraordinary in some of its phases, as the negro riot of 1741. We cannot fully appreciate it, not merely because of the incompleteness of some of its details, nor from the lapse of time, but because of our inability to place ourselves in the position or state of mind of the inhabitants of New York City at that period. We can no more throw ourselves into the social condition, and feel the influences of that time, than we can conceive the outward physical appearance of the embryo metropolis. It is impossible to stand amid the whirl and uproar of New York to-day, and imagine men ploughing, and sowing grain, and carting hay into barns, where the City Hall now stands. The conception of nearly all the city lying below the Park, above it farms to Canal Street, beyond that clearings where men are burning brush and logs to clear away the fallow, and still farther on, towards Central Park, an unbroken wilderness, is so dim and shadowy, that we can hardly fix its outlines. Yet it was so in 1741. Where now stands the Tombs, and cluster the crowded tenements of Five Points, was a pond or lakelet, nearly two miles in circumference and fifty feet deep, and encircled by a dense forest. Its deep, sluggish outlet into the Hudson is now Canal Street. In wet weather there was another water communication with the East River, near Peck Slip, cutting off the lower part of the island, leaving another island, containing some eight hundred acres. Through Broad Street, along which now rolls each day the stream of business, and swells the tumult of the Brokers' Board, then swept a deep stream, up which boatmen rowed their boats to sell oysters. The water that supplied these streams and ponds is now carried off through immense sewers, deep under ground, over which the unconscious population tread. Where Front and Water Streets on the east side, and West Greenwich and Washington on the west side, now stretch, were then the East and Hudson Rivers, having smooth and pebbly beaches. There was not a single sidewalk in all the city, and only some half dozen paved streets. On the Battery stood the fort, in which were the Governor's and secretary's houses, and over which floated the British flag. But all this outward appearance is no more unlike the New York of to-day than its internal condition.