The savage, perhaps, did master the mystery of the dug-out and the birch-bark canoe, but he had no place for his archives but a hole in the ground, and no experience but such as died with him. Man’s history begins with the attempt to conquer Nature. The contribution that Nature makes to human civilization is that she sets herself against his inward energies, as if to call them out. She puts limitations about him, that he may be prompted to rise above them. The fury and storm of the sea provokes his ingenuity to express itself in the steamship. The peril to life and fortune contained in the lightning’s flash, begets the steel rod that disarms it. The distance between the wheat that grows in one part of the globe and the need for bread in another, leads to the discovery of a method of transportation that obliterates it. Civilization is the expression that man has made of himself in his attempts, through thought and will, to effect the conquest of Nature. This witnesses to the peculiar and magnificent place which alone belongs to him in nature. It may be true that he has no kingdom of his own, no privileged class of his own, and no titled order of his own; but it can hardly be disputed that he has a history of his own. This history, written in the dim glories of vast empires, in the rush of splendid cities, in the age-long conflict between good and evil, in the undying creed of martyred faith, in the hope, fidelity, trial, agony, triumph, and self-sacrifice of the human race, bears witness to the fact, either that the earth was made for man, or else that he is the only creature upon it capable of subduing it, transforming it, recreating it, and appropriating it. If man is only a natural product, the powers have certainly been engaged in a marvelously intelligent and complicated sort of conspiracy to advance his interests and to serve his dominion. Nothing but what we have been accustomed to regard as design, intention, purpose, is sufficient to account for the fact, that the scheme of nature so completely corresponds to the understanding of man as to make it possible for him to command and claim all her possessions for his own. Men will never accept such a happy coincidence as the work of chance. They will, by the very structure of their minds, believe that the scheme and the understanding, which, through the process of struggle and trial, grows into it, were intended, by the Great Author of both, the one for the other. _BREAD._ “The power that Greece had to throw out light is marvelous, even now that we have the example of France. Greece did not colonize without civilizing—an example that more than one modern nation might follow: to buy and sell is not all. “Tyre bought and sold: Berytus bought and sold: Sidon bought and sold: Sarepta bought and sold. Where are these cities? Athens taught; and she is to this hour one of the capitals of human thought.