The work published by the Smithsonian Institution, in the number, variety, and value of the facts which it embodies, is undoubtedly entitled to a front rank in all that relates to American Archæology. The memoir of Mr. Caleb Atwater published in 1820, in the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, was, previously to the appearance of this work, the only authority on the subject. In the language of Mr. Gallatin, "it is very incomplete, has many mistakes, and is in no degree comparable to the work published by the Smithsonian Institution," which has been accepted as a standard in the department to which it relates. The results of Mr. Squier's inquiries into our Western antiquities are briefly;

1st. That the earthworks of the West are of a high but indeterminate antiquity; one, nevertheless, sufficiently great to admit of physical and natural changes, which, in historic regions, it has required thousands of years to bring about.

2d. That the ancient population of the Mississippi Valley was numerous and widely spread, as evinced from the number and magnitude of the ancient monuments, and the extensive range of their occurrence.

3d. That this population was essentially homogeneous in blood, customs, and habits; that it was stationary and agricultural; and although not having a high degree of civilization, was nevertheless possessed of systematic forms of religion and government.

4th. That the facts of which we are in possession, suggest a probable ancient connexion between the race of the mounds, and the semi-civilized aboriginal families of Central America and Mexico, but that there exists no direct evidence of such relationship.

Upon the question, What became of the race

sissippi Valley, the Character of the Ancient Earthworks, Structure and Purposes of the Mounds, etc., etc. By E. G. Squier.

of the Mounds? Mr. Squier has not, we believe, expressed an opinion. His writings, however, imply a total disregard of all hypotheses which would ascribe the ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley to others than a purely aboriginal origin, as idle puerile fancies.*

The "Ancient Monuments" was followed by another publication from Mr. Souier's pen by the Smithsonian Institution in 1849;-Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York, from Original Surveys and Explorations, under the auspices of the New York Historical Society, a work which was afterwards enlarged in a volume entitled, Antiquities of the State of New York, with a Supplement on the Antiquities of the West. This work established that the small and irregular earthworks, and other aboriginal remains, north-east of the great lakes, were to be ascribed to a comparatively recent period, and were probably due to the Indian tribes found in occupation of the country at the time of the discovery.

When General Taylor became President in 1848, Mr. Squier received the appointment of Chargé d'Affaires of the United States to the republics of Central America, in the discharge of which he negotiated three treaties with Nicaragua, Honduras, and San Salvador respectively. As an ardent advocate of American rights and interests, as well as of the political independence of the Central American States, he secured a personal influence on the Isthmus which has been directed to several objects of political and general interest, amongst which the opening, on most advantageous terms, of two new inter-oceanic routes, is not the least. His dispatches, published under order of Congress, fill two considerable volumes. He nevertheless found time, in the short period of his official duties, which were brought to a termination on the death of General Taylor, to make various explorations into the antiquities of the country, an account of which, as well as of his general political and social observations, etc., is included in his two valuable volumes entitled Nicaragua; its People, Scenery, and Monuments, published in 1852, which in original investigation, spirit of adventure, and picturesque narrative, is a companion to Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Central America and Yucatan.

Mr. Squier had previously, in 1851, published his volume, The Serpent Symbol, or the Worship of the Reciprocal Principles of Nature in America, the object of which seems to have been to show that the many resemblances, amounting in some instances to identities, between the manners, customs, institutions, and especially religions, of the great families of men in the old and new world, were not necessarily derivative, or the results of connexions or relationship, recent or remote. On the contrary, that these resemblances are due to like organizations, influenced by common natural suggestions, and the moulding force of circumstances.

On the publication of the work on Nicaragua,

Monumental Evidences of the Discovery of America by the Northmen, Critically Examined.-London Ethnological Journal, December, 1849. Review of "A Memoir on the European Colonization of America in Ante-Historic Times." By Dr. Zestermann. London. 1852.

Mr. Squier visited Europe, where he was introduced to the chief geographical and ethnological societies of England, Germany, and France; made the personal acquaintance of Humboldt, Ritter (who has introduced a translation of his work on Nicaragua to the German public), Lepsius, Jomard, Maury, and the remaining leaders of archæological and geographical science. The first diploma of the Geographical Society of France, for 1852, was awarded to Mr. Squier, who was at the same time elected associate of the National Society of Antiquarians of France, an honor which has been conferred upon only one other American, the Hon. Edward Everett.

While in Europe Mr. Squier kept up his taste for antiquarian investigations by an examination of the remains at Stonehenge, the results of which were communicated in a paper to the American 'Ethnological Society.* He also, in conjunction with Lord Londesborough, made some interesting explorations amongst the early British barrows of the north of England, near Scarborough.

In 1853 Mr. Squier again visited Central America for the purpose of investigating the line of an inter-oceanic railway, which his deductions on his previous visit had led him to consider possible, between some convenient harbor on the Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Fonseca on the Pacific. The result of this special point of investigation has been communicated to the public in Mr. Squier's preliminary report of the Honduras Inter-Oceanic Railway Company, of which he is Secretary. His further observations and adventures, at this time, are included in the two works which he has prepared, entitled Honduras and San Salvador, Geographical, Historical, and Statistical, with original maps and illustrative sketches, and a more personal volume, Hunting a Pass, comprising adventures, observations, and impressions during a year of active explorations in the States of Nicaragua, Honduras, and San Salvador, Central America. The numerous illustrations to these works are remarkable for their merit. They are from the pencil of the artist, Mr. D. C. Hitchcock, who accompanied Mr. Squier on his journeys as draftsman. The various vocabularies, plans, drawings of monuments, and other archæological materials collected during this last expedition, it is presumed will be embodied in a separate form.

Besides the writings which we have enumerated, Mr. Squier has been an industrious contributor to the periodical, new paper, and scientific literature of the day, on topics of politics affecting the foreign relations of the country with the States of Central America; the antiquities and ethnology of the aboriginal tribes of the country, in various journals, and in the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, of which he has been a prominent member.

ELISHA KENT KANE,

THE eminent Arctic explorer, was born in Philadelphia, Feb. 3, 1822. He took his degree at the Medical University of Pennsylvania in 1843; entered the United States Navy as assistant surgeon, and was attached as a physician to the

* Literary World, January 17 and 24, 1852.

first American embassy to China. Availing himself of the facilities of his position, he visited parts of China, the Philippines, Ceylon, and the interior of India. He is said to have been the second, if not the first person, having been certainly the first white person, to descend the crater of the Tael of Luzon, suspended by a bamboo rope around his body, from a projecting crag, two hundred and three feet above the scoria and debris. Upon this expedition, or one which followed it to the Indian Archipelago, he narrowly escaped with his life from the Ladrones who assailed him, sustained successfully an attack of an entire tribe of savages of the Negrito race, and was exposed to hardships under which his travelling companion, Baron Loe of Prussia, sank and died at Java. After this he ascended the Nile to the confines of Nubia, and passed a season in Egypt. He travelled through Greece on foot, and returned in 1846 through Europe to the United States. He was at once ordered to the coast of Africa, and when there, in 1847, made an effort to visit the slave marts of Whydah. He took the African fever, and was sent home in a very precarious state of health, from which, however, he recovered sufficiently to visit Mexico during the war as a volunteer. He made his way through the enemy's country with despatches for the American Commander-in-Chief from the President, with the notorious spy company of the brigand Dominguez as his escort; and, after a successful engagement with a party of the enemy whom they encountered at Nopaluca, he was forced to combat his companions single-handed to save the lives of his prisoners, Major-General Torrejon, General Gaona, and others, from their fury. He had his horse killed under him, and was badly wounded; but was restored to health by the hospitality and kind nursing of the grateful Mexicans, particularly the Gaona family of Puebla, by whom he was thus enabled to remain on service in Mexico till the cessation of hostilities.*

When the first Grinnell Expedition for the recovery of Sir John Franklin was projected in 1850, Dr. Kane was appointed senior surgeon and naturalist of the squadron, composed of the Advance and the Rescue, which set sail from New York May 22 of that year, under the command of Lieut. De Haven. After traversing the waters of Baffin's Bay to Melville Bay the expedition crossed to Lancaster Sound and Barrow Straits, and ascended Wellington Channel, where the notable discoveries were made which have given to the map of the world the names of Maury Channel, Grinnell Land, and Mount Franklin. The winter was passed by the expedition imbedded in the ice floe. From the thirteenth of January, 1851, to the fifth of June, the vessels drifted a distance of six hundred miles, when the ice pack immediately surrounding them was broken up in Baffin's Bay. At this time Dr. Kane met Lieut. Bellot, the young French officer whose melancholy fate in the Arctic Regions in August, 1853, was so greatly enhanced to the public mind by the successful results of the efforts at discovery which were announced at the same moment with his death.

* We find the preceding statement of facts in that excellent contribution to contemporary biography, "The Men of the Time," p.blished by Redfield.

perience before we learned to manage the peculiarities of their changed condition. Thus, dried apples became one solid breccial mass of impacted angularities, a conglomerate of sliced chalcedony. Dried peaches the same. To get these out of the barrel, or the barrel out of them, was a matter impossible. We found, after many trials, that the shortest and best plan was to cut up both fruit and barrel by repeated blows with a heavy axe, taking the lumps below to thaw. Saur-kraut resembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A crow-bar with chiseled edge extracted the lamina badly; but it was perhaps the best thing we could resort to.

"Sugar formed a very funny compound. Take q. 8. of cork raspings, and incorporate therewith another q. 8. of liquid gutta percha caoutchouc, and allow to harden: this extemporaneous formula will give you the brown sugar of our winter cruise. Extract with the saw; nothing but the saw will suit. Butter and lard, less changed, require a heavy

cold chisel and mallet. Their fracture is conchoidal, with hæmatitic (iron-ore pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little change, and molasses can at -28° be half scooped, half cut by a stiff iron ladle.

Pork and beef are rare specimens of Florentine mosaic, emulating the lost art of petrified visceral monstrosities seen at the medical schools of Bologna and Milan: crow-bar and handspike! for at-30° the axe can hardly chip it. A barrel sawed in half, and kept for two days in the caboose house at +76o, was still as refractory as flint a few inches below the surface. A similar bulk of lamp oil, denuded of the staves, stood like a yellow sandstone roller for a gravel walk.

"Ices for the dessert come of course unbidden, in all imaginable and unimaginable variety. I have tried my inventive powers on some of them. A Roman punch, a good deal stronger than the noblest Roman ever tasted, forms readily at -20°. Some sugared cranberries, with a little butter and scalding water, and you have an impromptu strawberry ice. Many a time at those funny little jams, that we call in Philadelphia parties,' where the lady-hostess glides with such nicely-regulated indifference through the complex machinery she has brought together, I have thought I noticed her stolen glance of anxiety at the cooing doves, whose icy bosoms were melting into one upon the supper-table before their time. We order these things better in the Arctic. Such is the composition and fierce quality' of our ices, that they are brought in served on the shaft of a hickory broom; a transfixing rod, which we use as a stirrer first and a fork afterward. So hard is this terminating cylinder of ice, that it might serve as a truncheon to knock down an ox. The only difficulty is in the processes that follow. It is the work of time and energy to impress it with the carvingknife, and you must handle your spoon deftly, or it fastens to your tongue. One of our mess was tempted the other day by the crystal transparency of an icicle to break it in his mouth; one piece froze to his tongue, and two others to his lips, and each carried off the skin: the thermometer was at -28°.”

SAMUEL ELIOT,

THE author of a History of Liberty, was born at Boston, the son of William H. Eliot, December 22, 1821. He was educated in Boston and at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1839. He continued his studies in Europe. He formed the idea of writing a History of Liberty in Rome, where he spent the winter of 1844-5, and has since been engaged upon the work.

In 1847, he published in Boston, Passages from the History of Liberty, in which he traced the career of the early Italian reformers, Arnaldo da Brescia, Giovanni di Vicenza, and others; of Savonarola; of Wycliffe in England, and the War of the Communities in Castile.

Then I thi

The first series of his more elaborate history in two volumes, appeared in 1849 with the title, The Liberty of Rome. In 1853, this work was reprinted in a revised form as The History of Liberty: Part I. The Ancient Romans, and in the same year appeared two similar volumes relating to The Early Christians. These consti

tuted two parts of an extensive work, of which three others are projected, devoted successively to the Papal Ages, the Monarchical Ages, and the American Nation.

The speciality of Mr. Eliot's historic labors is fully indicated in their title. It is to read the past, not for the purpose of curiosity, entertainment, or controversy, for the chronicle of kings and emperors, or the story of war and conquest, unless for their subordination to the progress of Liberty. His work is therefore a critical analysis rather than a narrative. As such it possesses much philosophical acumen, and bears evidences of a diligent study of the original and later authorities. The conception of the work is a noble one, and it may without vanity be said to be appropriately undertaken by an American.

As a specimen of the author's manner, we present a passage at the close of the history of Roman liberty with the establishment of the Emperors, and at the dawn of the new divine dispensation for all true freedom and progress of humanity in Christianity.

CLOSE OF ANTIQUITY.

Thus is our Era to be named of Hope. CARLYLE, French Revolution, Book II. ch. 8. The course of the olden time was run. Its generations had wrought the work appointed them to do. Their powers were exhausted. Their liberty, in other words, their ability to exercise their powers, was itself overthrown.

From the outset there had been no union amongst men. The opposite system of centralization, by which the many were bound to the few, had prevailed at the beginning. Weakened, indeed, but more than ever developed, it prevailed also at the end. To renew and to extend this system had been the appointed work of the ancient Romans. Not to unite, not to liberate the human race, had they been intrusted with dominion. It was to reduce mankind, themselves included, to dissension and to submission, that the Romans were allowed their liberty.

To such an end their liberty, like that of the elder nations, was providentially adapted. As a possession, it was in the hands not of the best, but of the strongest. As a right, it was not the right to improve one's self, but that to restrain others. It was the claim to be served by others. It was not the privilege of serving others. Much less was it the privilege of serving God. Struggling amidst the laws of man, instead of resting upon those of God, it was the liberty of men destined to contention until they fell in servitude.

There were exceptions. Not every one lost him. self in the dust and the agony of strife. Not every generation spent itself in conflicts. The physical powers were not always the only ones in exercise. At times the intellectual powers obtained develop. ment. At rarer seasons, the spiritual powers evinced themselves. A generation might thus attain to a liberty far wider than that of its predecessors. An individual might thus rise to a liberty far higher than that of his contemporaries. Yet these were but exceptions. The rule, confirmed by them, was the tendency of men to a lower, rather than a higher state. Indirectly, they were led towards the higher state, for which the lower was the necessary preparation. But the passage was to be made through the lower. Every bad work that succeeded, every good work that failed, brought mankind nearer to the end of the prevailing evil. The advent of the approaching good was hastened by every downward step towards prostration.

From the masses of the clouds the light first fades away. It presently vanishes from the patches in the skies originally undimmed. Then darkness overspreads the heavens. Men fall supine upon the earth. The night of universal humiliation sets in. But the gloom is not unbroken. Overshadowed as is the scene, it is not overwhelmed. There still remain the vales where truth has descended. There still exist the peaks to which love in its longing has climbed. Desires too earnest to have been wasted, principles too honest to have been unproductive, still linger in promise of the coming day. Men were to be humbled. They needed to feel the insecurity of their liberty, of the powers which made it their right, of the laws which made it their possession. But they did not need to be bereft of the good which their laws and their powers, however imperfect, comprehended.

The day of redemption followed. It was not too late. It was not too soon. The human race had been tried. It had not been annihilated. Then the angels sang their song of glory to God and peace amongst His creatures. We may believe that when the morning came, the oppression and the servitude of old had left their darkest forms amidst the midnight clouds. Before the death of Augustus, the Business of THE FATHER had already been begun in the Temple at Jerusalem; and near by, THE SON was increasing in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.

The sea, as it were, whereon wave has pursued wave through day and night, through years and centuries, before our eyes, is thus illumined with the advancing light which we have been waiting to behold. And as we stand upon the shore, conscious of the Spirit that has moved upon the face of the waters, we may lift our eyes with more confiding faith to the over-watching Heaven.

craft in London, writes good verses himself. On two occasions, in 1838 and '48, Mr. Fields has delivered a poem before the Boston Mercantile Association. Sentiment and point, in good set iambics and clashing rhymes, are the approved necessities of these affairs. Mr. Fields's poems on Commerce and "the Post of Honor" are wanting in neither. An elegantly printed little volume, in the highest luxury of the press, contains his miscellaneous poems. They are truthful and unaffected in sentiment, finished and delicate in expression.

WORDSWORTH.

The grass hung wet on Rydal banks,
The golden day with pearls adorning,
When side by side with him we walked
To meet midway the summer morning.
The west wind took a softer breath,

The sun himself seemed brighter shining,
As through the porch the minstrel stept-
His eye sweet Nature's look enshrining.
He passed along the dewy sward,

The blue-bird sang aloft "good-morrow!"
He plucked a bud, the flower awoke,
And smiled without one pang of sorrow.
He spoke of all that graced the scene

In tones that fell like music round us,
We felt the charm descend, nor strove

To break the rapturous spell that bound us. We listened with mysterious awe,

Strange feelings mingling with our pleasure; We heard that day prophetic words,

High thoughts the heart must always treasure. Great Nature's Priest! thy calm career,

With that sweet morn, on earth has endedBut who shall say thy mission died When, winged for Heaven, thy soul ascended!

DIRGE FOR A YOUNG GIRL

Underneath the sod, low lying,

Dark and drear,

Sleepeth one who left, in dying,
Sorrow here.

Yes, they're ever bending o'er her,
Eyes that weep;

Forms that to the cold grave bore her
Vigils keep.

When the summer moon is shining
Soft and fair,

Friends she loved in tears are twining
Chaplets there.

Rest in peace, thou gentle spirit,
Throned above;

Souls like thine with God inherit
Life and love!

EVENTIDE.

This cottage door, this gentle gale,
Hay-scented, whispering round,
Yon path-side rose, that down the vale
Breathes incense from the ground,

Methinks should from the dullest clod
Invite a thankful heart to God.
But, Lord, the violet, bending low,
Seems better moved to praise;
From us, what scanty blessings flow,
How voiceless close our days:-

Father, forgive us, and the flowers
Shall lead in prayer the vesper hours