motion more conspicuous than in the modern apparatus for preparing, spinning, and weaving vegetable and other fibres into fabrics for clothing. The simple application of rotary motion to these processes has changed the domestic economy of the world, and increased the general comforts of our race a hundred fold. The birth of the arts here, and not least among them that of the humble one of spinning, has relation to a problem in American ethnology of great and increasing interest--_the early occupancy or first peopling of this hemisphere_. Were there through countless ages no eyes or hearts here to respond to the smiling heaven, none to taste the teeming fruits or inhale the aroma of flowers? Was the placid atmosphere never moved by the prattle and laughter of children, the songs of birds, or the sudden start of quadrupeds arrested by the presence of the race ordained to rule over them, until a few straggling members of that race arrived (perhaps driven hither by tempests) from abroad, to claim the splendid heritage? If the red man was not indigenous to the soil, if the first settlers were aliens, how natural the desire to know who they were, whence they came, and how, and when, and over what regions extended the first rights of preëmption! to ask whether they left no memorials in the languages that have come down to us, in legends, manners, customs, traditions, religious observances and rites, no signs in arts, utensils, arms, or other relics extant? whether they left no marks in earth-works--those most lasting of records--in quarries and entrenchments, in mines, tumuli, and mounds? It is reasonable to suppose--and difficult to suppose otherwise--that if no human form was ever reflected from the surfaces of these lakes and rivers, no human voice heard in these forests, the imprint of no human foot left on these sands, until colonized from another continent, the arts of that continent must have been considerably advanced before the means of transport, or inducements to emigrate, were evolved; and under any circumstances, a knowledge of the most essential, would be brought over. Of these, such as related to domestic habits and the occupations of women, would be prominent, and among these spinning most of all. When once introduced, this art could not have been lost, indispensable as it is to the savage and demi-savage condition, and the original process or processes, whencesoever derived, unless superseded by better, would have been continued by every generation.