The Phœnicians, in the time of Alexander, pretended that they had been settled in their own country for thirty thousand years; and those thirty thousand years were as full of prodigies as the Egyptian chronology. I admit it to be perfectly consistent with physical possibility that Phœnicia may have existed, not merely for thirty thousand years, but thirty thousand millions of ages, and that it may have endured, as well as the other portions of the globe, thirty millions of revolutions. But of all this we possess no knowledge. The ridiculous miracles which abound in the ancient history of Greece are universally known. The Romans, although a serious and grave people, have, nevertheless, equally involved in fables the early periods of their history. That nation, so recent in comparison with those of Asia, was five hundred years without historians. It is impossible, therefore, to be surprised on finding that Romulus was the son of Mars; that a she-wolf was his nurse; that he marched with a thousand men from his own village, Rome, against twenty thousand warriors belonging to the city of the Sabines; that he afterwards became a god; that the elder Tarquin cut through a stone with a razor, and that a vestal drew a ship to land with her girdle, etc. The first annals of modern nations are no less fabulous; things prodigious and improbable ought sometimes, undoubtedly, to be related, but only as proofs of human credulity. They constitute part of the history of human opinion and absurdities; but the field is too immense. _Of Monuments or Memorials._ The only proper method of endeavoring to acquire some knowledge of ancient history is to ascertain whether there remain any incontestable public monuments. We possess only three such, in the way of writing or inscription. The first is the collection of astronomical observations made during nineteen hundred successive years at Babylon, and transferred by Alexander to Greece. This series of observations, which goes back two thousand two hundred and thirty-four years beyond our vulgar era, decidedly proves that the Babylonians existed as an associated and incorporated people many ages before; for the arts are struck out and elaborated only in the slow course of time, and the indolence natural to mankind permits thousands of years to roll away without their acquiring any other knowledge or talents than what are required for food, clothing, shelter, and mutual destruction. Let the truth of these remarks be judged of from the state of the Germans and the English in the time of Cæsar, from that of the Tartars at the present day, from that of two-thirds of Africa, and from that of all the various nations found in the vast continent of America, excepting, in some respects, the kingdoms of Peru and Mexico, and the republic of Tlascala. Let it be recollected that in the whole of the new world not a single individual could write or read.