After the deluge, we find the human race settled in the plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, attracted thither by the fertility of their alluvial soils. There we find them engaging in a great political scheme, no doubt founded on recollections of the old antediluvian nationalities, and on a dread of the evils which able and aspiring men would anticipate from that wide dispersion of the human race that appears to have been intended by the Creator in the new circumstances of the earth. They commenced accordingly the erection of a city or tower at Babel, in the plain of Shinar, to form a common bond of union, a great public work that should be a rallying-point for the race, and around which its patriotism might concentrate itself. The attempt was counteracted by an interposition of divine Providence; and thenceforth the diffusion of the human race proceeded unchecked, carrying with it everywhere the memory of the celebrated tower, which perpetuated itself not only in the mounds of Assyria and Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, but in the teocallis and temple mounds of the New World. The Babel enterprise is in fact the first recorded development of that mound-building instinct which the earlier races everywhere evince, and which has been a distinguishing characteristic more especially of the Cushite or Turanian race, and has apparently made them the teachers of constructive arts to all other peoples. Perhaps a dread of the total decay and loss of the surviving antediluvian arts in construction and other matters may have been one impelling motive to the building of Babel. Perhaps it was connected with the communistic ideas of the Turanian race, and their conflict with the patriarchal habits of the Semites. Out of the enterprise at Babel, however, arose a new type of evil, which, in the forms of military despotism, the spirit of conquest, hero-worship, and the alliance of these influences with literature and the arts, has been handed down through every succeeding age to our own time. The name of Nimrod, the son of Cush, has been preserved to us in the Bible, and also apparently in the tablets and inscriptions of Assyria, as the founder of the first despotism. This bold and ambitious man, subsequently deified under different names, established a Hamite or Turanian empire, which appears to have extended its sway over the tribes occupying Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, everywhere supporting its power by force of arms, and introducing a debasing polytheistic hero-worship, and certain forms of art probably derived from antediluvian times. The centre of this Cushite empire, however, gave way to the rising power of Assyria or the Ashurite branch of the sons of Shem, at a period antecedent to the dawn of profane history, except in its mythical form; and when the light of secular history first breaks upon us, we find Egypt standing forth as the only stable representative of the arts, the systems, and the superstitions of the