traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies." Nevertheless, to be honest and thorough in a matter of such importance in the history of New-York, we must not shrink from looking at facts which may reverse, or at least unsettle, a popular tradition. Although the chapter alluded to seems to bring forward abundant reasons for believing that Hudson was preceded by Verrazano and Gomez, or even that he was not quite ignorant of the existence of the river it is supposed he looked upon as its original discoverer, still we may cling with considerable reason to the impressions of our ancestors. For whatever other navigators may have entered the Bay of New-York, or caught a glimpse of or even explored its noble river, before him, the exploration made by Henry Hudson possesses over the others not only the great advantage of having been carefully made and circumstantially reported, but of having never been lost sight of from the time of its occurrence to the present day. It bore fruit immediately in trading voyages begun the very next year; in temporary settlements upon the banks of the great river within five years after it had thus become known to the world; and finally, in regular colonization and permanent occupation by a civilized community through a period of nearly three centuries. It will therefore never lose any of its importance and significance, and hence we shall ever be justified in regarding with interest the arrival of the Half-Moon in September, 1609.

From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, from the Cabots to Sir John Franklin, Baron Nordenskjöld, and Lieutenant De Long, the ignis fatuus of a passage through the frozen Arctic to the torrid zone of India has been almost constantly pursued, and with disappointment or disaster almost as constant and certain. Until within a comparatively recent period the object which prompted men to Arctic voyages was not the verifying of a fond and visionary fancy, or the higher aims of geographical and scientific discovery. It was purely commercial, and therefore intensely practical. It was believed by the Cabots and, as Motley tells us, by the Dutch cosmographers after them, that a good ten thousand miles of travel,-not to speak of peril from the warships of Spain,- might be saved, if the passage to India could be effected by the north. It may therefore be accounted to the credit of Sebastian Cabot that he kept himself, and quite as persistently held others, to that idea. It was at his instance that Gomez went from Spain to seek for a northwest passage, and Verrazano may have been influenced by the same ambition coming from the same source. But when towards the close of his eventful life Cabot left the service of Spain and returned to that of England, as a result we see English adventurers setting out for the Arctic regions as early as the year 1553. Having himself failed in the northwest, and others