Thence he passed successively to the other most renowned seminaries; in which, for twenty-two years, he prosecuted his inquiries, at the feet and under the guidance of the learned Gamaliels of the day, with the most untiring patience, docility, perseverance and enthusiasm. After this pretty thorough novitiate in Egypt, and after travelling into Chaldæa, Persia and Phoenicia in quest of knowledge, he returned to his own native Samosthere to be persecuted by the same fell spirit of ignorance, envy, prejudice and bigotry, which, in a later and Christian age, haunted and embittered the existence of Roger Bacon and Galileo. Finally, he established a school of his own at Crotona in Italy. And Plato too, the devoted disciple of Socrates during eight happy years, then a student of the Pythagorean philosophy in Magna Græcia, and of various sciences at other distinguished foreign schools, thought it necessary to attend the lectures of the Egyptian professors also, before he opened his own famous Academy at Athens. Verily, the Grecian scholars must have been sorry lads, or they could hardly have contrived to lounge away their entire youth and some ten or twenty years of mature manhood, among a set of dreamy pedagogues, who, agreeably to the vulgar faith, would have disgraced the old field schools of our own unparalleled Virginia! We, however, with these and many similar facts on record, should, in our extreme simplicity, be disposed to think it impossible for the most intrepid skepticism to deny to ancient Egypt the palm of pre-eminent wisdom and learning.

Of such pupils as Moses and Plato, her universities may have well been proud. And from the works and reputation of the pupil we may still judge of the master.

And if we bear in mind, that even Plato and most of the other Greeks did not visit Egypt until after the Babylonian and Persian invasions, when only the wreck of her former science remained, we shall be able to make some equitable allowance for the fragmentary character of their reports, and for the seeming contradictions and even absurdities which we occasionally find in their writings.

O, quam te dicam bonam

Antehac fuisse, tales cum sint reliquiæ ?

But this paper must have an end. In preparing it, I have felt the difficulty of selection from the great mass of materials at hand, and especially of compressing within the limits of a readable article a small portion of the most prominent and pertinent facts which abound in ancient authors. These, if judiciously arranged and fairly interpreted, could scarcely fail to dissipate much of the prejudice, error and skepticism which prevail on this subject. I had designed to bring under review the arts and sciences actually known among the earliest postdiluvian nations; and to offer a few brief comments upon their literature, manners, customs, laws, religion and peculiar institutions. I had also marked a number of passages in sundry modern writers, with a view to point out the inconclusiveness of their reasoning, and its inconsistency oftentimes with the very premises which

they themselves admit. How much learned ingenuity, for example, has not been expended in attempts to depreciate or to get rid of the Egyptian claims to any respectable degree of proficiency in astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, metallurgy, physics, anatomy, navigation, geography, architecture, engraving, sculpture, painting, etc., merely because an arbitrary and inexorable theory seemed to demand a vastly longer time for such high attainments than any authentic history could furnish?

I conclude then with the remark, that if the Egyptians, Assyrians and Phoenicians never existed in a savage state; if their immediate progenitors, up to the age of Noah, were, like himself, civilized (and we proved, as we think, on a previous occasion, that man was created a civilized being, and thus continued down to the miraculous dispersion from Babel)-then it follows, that history cannot conduct us back to a period when the whole human race was savage; and consequently, that the philosophic and popular doctrine, that the savage was the original or primeval condition of mankind is indefensible;-that it is a mere gratuitous and baseless assumption; and that the entire fabric, constructed by system-builders upon this foundation, is but a castle in the air, and can never withstand the artillery of reason, Scripture and history.

As before we traced the stream of civilization, as it issued pure and bright from the primitive fountain in Eden, throughout the antediluvian world, to the fertile

plains of Shinar; so now we can retrace it upwards till we arrive at the same point. The course is obvious, simple and direct. The civilization of modern Europe of the Gauls, Germans, Britons, Goths, Vandals, Huns, Scandinavians, and the rest of the Northern barbarians—was derived from the Romans; as theirs had been from the Greeks; and theirs again from the Egyptians and other Orientals. Prior to these latter nations, savage life is unknown to either sacred or profane history.

THE ABORIGINES OF NORTH AMERICA.

[The following remarks may be regarded as a mere appendix of notes to the preceding articles upon The Primitive State of Mankind.]

I MENTIONED America among the countries doomed, probably soon after the flood, to be the abode of savages. I am aware that plausible objections have been urged against the opinion that America was known, or even inhabited, at a very early period. I am aware, also, that diverse theories have been contrived and advocated to account for the peopling of this vast continent. With these conflicting speculations, I do not mean to intermeddle at present.

But let it be remembered, that we have no authentic history of any country which was not inhabited at the time when it was first discovered or visited by civilized man. And who can pretend to tell us when or how the first inhabitants arrived there? Why are we to suppose that America was not peopled as soon as China and Japan, and Gaul and Britain, and the western and southern coasts of Africa? The reason assigned is, that, in those rude ages, as we are pleased to style them, men had not wit or knowledge enough to get there. They had not the means of transportation. They were ignorant of the arts of ship-building and navigation. Indeed!