Let us now briefly consider the progressive changes which have passed upon this great geographical chart of historical development, and observe their effects. Successive tribes of living beings have perished thereon, and been replaced with better and nobler races, until at last man came to be lord of earth, and to reap from it all the enjoyments increasing culture could bestow. From the beginning, progress has been maintained in and through convulsions, each succeeding tempest alternating with a sublimer calm. Relying on human traditions alone, we can acquaint ourselves with no primary people, no first seat of civilization, no original philosophy, or natural wisdom. Guided by a higher authority, it is necessary to penetrate the intervening mists of symbolical fables, and collect numerous scientific facts, in order to attain secure ground, whereon the first germ of humanity was planted, and whence it has perpetually developed itself under the control of unfaltering law. At the farthest horizon of the most venerable antiquity, several light points appear, the harbingers of civilization, radiating toward each other, and indicating a common point of union in the darkness behind. They resemble the superior lights among the stars of the firmament, whose brightness we perceive amid the eternal suns of the universe, but whose relative distances from our own planet it is impossible to ascertain. The dwelling of a divine spark in the human bosom has, even from the obscurest height of Caucasus, been recognized in the beautiful tradition of Prometheus; but the question of the first springing up of mankind can not be fully elucidated by mere antiquarian research. In the last result, that is a matter to be left to the disclosures of revelation and the exercise of faith. The Mosaic narrative of creation is the primitive document of our race, and this commemorates the repeated convulsions and prodigious corruption of the world, previous to the Noachian flood. Of the earliest period, it says: "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Gen. i. 2. Of post-diluvian history, every thing was embraced in that last recorded fact of Noah's life, a prophecy delivered in the infancy of mankind, and which every succeeding development has only tended to illustrate and confirm. Gen. ix. 18, 19--"The sons of Noah that went forth from the ark, were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole (inhabited) earth overspread." On these three races distinct destinies were pronounced, they receiving a moral and physical nature accordant to their several allotments. The office of extension was given to Japhet, that of religion to Shem, and servitude to Ham.