The universal deluge, of which the whole surface of our globe presents so many and so great traces and proofs, forms a partition-wall, sternly separating the earliest races of men from the subsequent generations. Of the former it is only probable that they were very different from the latter, not only in their manner of life, but also in their physical and intellectual powers and endowments, and likewise, perhaps, in the nature and mode of their moral corruption and depravity. My remarks, therefore, may well be confined to this side of that great partition-wall. The next great catastrophe, which is both expressly given out as a divine retribution (and, as such, can be proved from profane history as much, though not so universally, as the former), is the so-called Babylonian confusion of tongues and the dispersion of nations. This, and that which is so inseparably connected with it, the confusion of mythical ideas and legends, is rather hinted at than fully and clearly detailed. The time, too, is not given, though the locality is expressly mentioned. It is the same one which, according to all other historical statements, was the very spot of Western Central Asia, where that contagious malady of the lust of conquest first arose, or, if we may be allowed the expression, where this unhappy _invention_ was first made. This dispersion of nations, however, was its natural punishment, since every unity which is either politically false or intellectually untrue, must terminate in chaotic dissolution. This historical fact is distinctly traceable in the world of the ancients among the West Asiatic, South European, and North African nations which dwell around the shores of the Mediterranean. Here we can scarcely find our way out of the labyrinth of traces of reciprocal relationship which abound, in their medley of cognate languages and their chaos of legends, so remarkably agreeing, and yet frequently so inconsistent in their ideas of nature, their far-reaching theogonies, and the divine origination of their heroic families. These chaotic contradictions, however, in which the poetry of heathendom indulged without restraint, gradually undermined the old popular belief, and led, consequently, at a later period, to a very favorable result.