Let me here remind you in the passing, that that antiquity of type which characterizes the recent productions of North America is one of many wonders,--not absolutely geological in themselves, but which, save for the revelations of geology, would have forever remained unnoted and unknown,--which have been pressed, during the last half century, on the notice of naturalists. "It is a circumstance quite extraordinary and unexpected," says Agassiz, in his profoundly interesting work on Lake Superior, "that the fossil plants of the Tertiary beds of Oeningen resemble more closely the trees and shrubs which grow at present in the eastern parts of North America, than those of any other parts of the world; thus allowing us to express correctly the difference between the opposite coasts of Europe and America, by saying that the present eastern American flora, and, I may add, the fauna also, have a more ancient character than those of Europe. The plants, especially the trees and shrubs, growing in our days in the United States, are, as it were, old-fashioned; and the characteristic genera Lagomys, Chelydra, and the large Salamanders with permanent gills, that remind us of the fossils of Oeningen, are at least equally so;--they bear the marks of former ages." How strange a fact! Not only are we accustomed to speak of the eastern continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent of the west, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old World, in contradistinction to the post-diluvian world which succeeded it. And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its acceptations, is America an older world still,--an older world than that of the eastern continents,--an older world, in the fashion and type of its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant settler takes axe amid the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before him,--the brushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool,--the unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,--the lazy fish-like reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he descends to the neighboring creek to drink,--the fierce alligator-like tortoise, with the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds for fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water,--and the little hare-like rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way,--all attest, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old a country the seemingly new one really is,--a country vastly older, in type at least, than that of the antediluvians and the patriarchs, and only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose perished productions we find locked up in the _loess_ of the Rhine, or amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically the _Old_ World. If