the Azoic beds do not lie horizontally along the base of the Laurentian Hills in the position in which they must originally have been deposited, but are lifted and rest against their slopes. They have been more or less dislocated in this process, and are greatly metamorphized by the intense heat to which they must have been exposed. Indeed, all the oldest stratified rocks have been baked by the prolonged action of heat. It may be asked how the materials for those first stratified deposits were provided. In later times, when an abundant and various soil covered the earth, when every river brought down to the ocean, not only its yearly tribute of mud or clay or lime, but the débris of animals and plants that lived and died in its waters or along its banks, when every lake and pond deposited at its bottom in successive layers the lighter or heavier materials floating in its waters and settling gradually beneath them, the process by which stratified materials are collected and gradually harden into rock is more easily understood. But when the solid surface of the earth was only just beginning to form, it would seem that the floating matter in the sea can hardly have been in sufficient quantity to form any extensive deposits. No doubt there was some abrasion even of that first crust; but the more abundant source of the earliest stratification is to be found in the submarine volcanoes that poured their liquid streams into the first ocean. At what rate these materials would be distributed and precipitated in regular strata it is impossible to determine; but that volcanic materials were so deposited in layers is evident from the relative position of the earliest rocks. I have already spoken of the innumerable chimneys perforating the Azoic beds, narrow outlets of Plutonic rock, protruding through the earliest strata. Not only are such funnels filled with the crystalline mass of granite that flowed through them in a liquid state, but it has often poured over their sides,

mingling with the stratified beds around. In the present state of our knowledge, we can explain such appearances only by supposing that the heated materials within the earth's crust poured out frequently, meeting little resistance,—that they then scattered and were precipitated in the ocean around, settling in successive strata at its bottom,- that through such strata the heated masses within continued to pour again and again, forming for themselves the chimney-like outlets above mentioned.

Such, then, was the earliest American land, -a long, narrow island, almost continental in its proportions, since it stretches from the eastern borders of Canada nearly to the point where now the base of the Rocky Mountains meets the plain of the Mississippi Valley. We may still walk along its ridge and know that we tread upon the ancient granite that first divided the waters into a northern and southern ocean; and if our imaginations will carry us so far, we may look down toward its base and fancy how the sea washed against this earliest shore of a lifeless world. This is no romance, but the bald, simple truth; for the fact that this granite band was lifted out of the waters so early in the history of the world, and has not since been submerged, has, of course, prevented any subsequent deposits from forming above it. And this is true of all the northern part of the United States. It has been lifted gradually, the beds deposited in one period being subsequently raised, and forming a shore along which those of the succeeding one collected, so that we have their whole sequence before us. In regions where all the geological deposits, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, etc., are piled one upon another, and we can get a glimpse of their internal relations only where some rent has laid them open, or where their ragged edges, worn away by the abrading action of external influences, expose to view their successive layers, it must, of course, be more difficult to follow

their connection. For this reason the American continent offers facilities to the geologist denied to him in the socalled Old World, where the earlier deposits are comparatively hidden, and the broken character of the land, intersected by mountains in every direction, renders his investigation still more difficult. Of course, when I speak of the geological deposits as so completely unveiled to us here, I do not forget the sheet of drift which covers the continent from North to South, and which we shall discuss hereafter, when I reach that part of my subject. But the drift is only a superficial and recent addition

to the soil, resting loosely above the other geological deposits, and arising, as we shall see, from very different

causes.

In this article I have intended to limit myself to a general sketch of the formation of the Laurentian Hills with the Azoic stratified beds resting against them. In the Silurian epoch following the Azoic we have the first beach on which any life stirred; it extended along the base of the Azoic beds, widening by its extensive deposits the narrow strip of land already upheaved. I propose in my next article to invite my readers to a stroll with me along that beach.

ANCIENT history is forever indispensable to the speculative historian. The ground of its value is the very fact of its antiquity; by which we mean, not simply distance in time, but distance as the result of separate construction, distance as between two systems of reality, each orbicularly distinct from the other. One system-that with which our destiny is concurrent—is still flying its rounds in space; the other has whirled itself out of space, and through a maze of scattered myths and records, into human remembrances. This latter system, though hermetically sealed to the realities of outward existence, still, and by this very exclusion from all practical uses, becomes of paramount interest to the philosophic historian; indeed, it is only because the shadowy planets of the ancient cycle still repeat their revolutions in human thought, that the philosophy of history is at all possible. Philosophy, in its ideal pretensions, frequently forgets its material conditions: it claims for itself the power of constructing wholes in thought where only parts have been given in reality,

as if, dispensing with material supports, it could bridge over a chasm in Nature. And so it seems to do, but so in fact it never does; it never builds but on models; it never in any system gives ideal completeness, until a real completeness is furnished, either through this system or some other that is analogous. There can, therefore, be no speculative anticipation in history, save as it makes its way into the blank future along the line of diagrams furnished by the past; the splendid composition, in our thoughts, of realities as yet undeveloped, is set up in the skeleton types left us of realities that not only have themselves been accomplished, but which belong to a system that is concluded.

of history. Admitted; yet this does not at all disturb our position. No motive would have sufficed for so grand an aim, short of a sublime consciousness regarding the destiny of the human race. But whence was this consciousness to be derived? To the ancient mind, the development of the human drama, considered strictly as human, moved within narrow boundaries; traced backward through a number of generations so limited that they might be counted on one's fingers, the human personæ did not absolutely disappear, but they emerged again, and in a precedent cycle, only as divinities. The consciousness of human destiny was thus elevated by infinite grades, but not of this destiny as human, as depending for its splendors upon the human will. It was an exaltation that consisted in the sacrifice of humanity. No definite records existed through which any previous cycle of human events could be translated into thought; and in default of a human, there was substituted a divine cycle. From this mythologic past of the ancients was reflected upon their present every-day existence a peculiar glory; but it was not the glory of humanity. To celestial or infernal powers were attributed the motives and impulses out of which their life was developed, not to the human will. The future, as a matter of course, partook of this divine investment; so that history to the ancients was something which in either direction was lost in mystery, not a system to be philosophically analyzed, or to be based on principles of any sort. It is true that in the time of Herodotus, when nations, hitherto insulated, came to know each other better, an interest began to be awakened in history as resting upon a human basis; but this is to be accounted for only by the fact, that each nation coming in contact with another received from it the record of a development differing from its own in the details of outward circumstances, yet similar in certain general features; and in some

cases, as in that of Egypt, there was presented an historic epos anterior in time. But in no case were furnished hints so suggestive as those which ancient history furnishes to us, nor any which would answer the purposes of philosophy; in no case was there presented a completed arch, but only antecedent parts of a structure yet in suspense respecting its own conclusion. Fate uncourteously insisted upon making her disclosures by separate instalments; she would advance nothing at any rate of discount. What, therefore, was the ancient philosopher to do? His reflections concerning the past must of necessity be partial; how much more would his anticipations of the future fail of anything like demonstrative certitude!

We moderns, on the other hand, are eminently fortunate, because within the cycle of our thoughts revolves the entire epos of the ancient world. Here there is the element of completeness: it is our privilege to look upon the final tableau before the curtain falls, to have gathered in the concluding no less than the prelusive signals, to have seen where the last stone in the arch bottoms upon a real basis. Let it be that to us it is a drama of shadows; yet are none of the prominent features lost; indeed, they are rather magnified by the distance; our actors upon the ancient proscenium walk in buskins and look upon us out of masks whose significance has been intensified by remoteness in time. This view of the case yields an ample refutation of those arguments frequently adduced of late, in certain quarters, to prove the inutility of classical studies. Thus, it is urged, that, in every department of human knowledge, we transcend the most splendid acquirements of the ancients, and therefore that it is so much time wasted which we devote towards keeping up an acquaintance with antiquity. But how is it that we so far overtop the ancients? Simply by preserving our conscious connection with them, just as man

hood towers above childhood through the remembered experiences of childhood. As an evidence of this, we need only note the sudden impulse which modern civilization received through the revival of ancient literature. As it is by resolving into constellations the nebula, disconnected from the earth by vast intervals of space, that we conjecture the awful magnitude of the universe, so do we conjecture the magnitude of human life by resolving into distinct shapes the nebulous mist of antiquity separated from us by vast intervals in time. The profoundest lessons, such as are heeded by the race, such as are universally intelligible, have this obliquity of origin. Thus, in the distractions of the present, no relief is found through compensatory consolations from the present; but we turn to the figures of the past, — figures caught in the mind, and held fixed, as in basrelief,-figures in the attitude of antagonistic strife or of sublime rest,-figures that master our intellects as can none from the tumultuous present, (excepting the present of dreams,) and that out of their eternal repose anticipate for us contingencies that do not yet exist, but are representatively typified through such as have existed and passed away.

It is a fact well ascertained in physical geography, that the New World and the Old stand over against each other, not merely as antipodal opposites, but so corresponding in outline that a promontory in one is met by a gulf in the other, and sinuous seas by outstanding continents, (so that over against the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, is opposed the projection of Western Africa,) as if the gods had, in the registry of some important covenant, rent the earth in twain for indentures. In this way, also, do the two great hemispheres of Time stand opposed; so that, from the shaping of the ancient, we may anticipate even the undeveloped conformation of the modern: in place of the direct reality, which is of necessity wanting, we have the next best thing

to guide us even in our most perilous coastings, namely, its well-defined analogue in the remote past.

Thus, considering merely this analogism, might one have prophetically announced, even in the generations immediately succeeding to Christ, when Christianity bade fair to become a worldpower in a new civilization, that here, indeed, was a new planting of Mysteries, which, although infinitely transcending them in fulness and meaning, were yet the counterparts of mysteries which had hitherto swayed the human heart, — but that, pure and holy as were these mysteries, they should yet, in their human connections, share the vicissitudes of the old, that, like them, they should march through tribulations on to triumph, -that, like them, once having triumphed and become a recognized source of power, they should be linked with hierarchical delusions and the degradations of despotism,-that, like them, too, in some future generation, they should, through the protesting intellect, be uplifted from these delusions and degradations. Thus, also, and following the same guidance, might our prophet have foretold the political shapings of the newly emerging hemisphere of Christendom. He would thus, through a precise analogy in ancient history, have anticipated the conjunction of principles so novel in their operation as were those of Christianity with the new races, then lying in wait along the skirts of the Roman Empire, and biding their time. From a necessity already demonstrated in the ancient world, he would have foreseen the necessity of Feudalism for the modern, as following inevitably in the train of barbarian conquest, the recurrence of which had been distinctly foreshadowed. In connection with the Protestantism of intellect in religious matters, he would have anticipated a similar movement in politics; he would have prefigured the conflict that was to be renewed between the many and the few for power; and if by some miracle his material vision

could have been made coextensive in space with the scope which was possible for him in thought, if he could have followed the sails of Columbus across the Atlantic, then, in connection with the transference of European civilization to the New World, and foreseeing the revulsion in habits and institutions that must follow such local separation, he might have indicated the arena which representatively was to stand for Christendom, and in which, if anywhere, the great problem of human freedom should be solved, either by a success so grand that the very reflex of its splendor should illumine the universal heart of man, or by a failure so overwhelming and disastrous that the ruinous impulse should be communicated with the crushing effect of a thunderbolt through the whole structure of Christian civilization.

Standing, as we do, face to face with 'the crisis in which this problem is to be solved, and through one part or the other of the alternative just stated, it is evident, from what has already been said, that no light can so fully illustrate the position and its contingencies as that which reaches us from antiquity, and through analogies such as we have hinted at in the preceding paragraphs.

In the first place, in order properly to understand the specific analogy which we now proceed to develop and apply to the case in hand, it is absolutely necessary that the reader should fix Hellas in his mind's eye as the counterpart of Christendom. Let it be understood, then, that all that preceded Hellenism in the ancient world was but the vestibule of its magnificent temple, and that the sole function of the Roman Empire, which came afterwards, was to tide the world over from Hellenic realities to the more sublime realities of Christianity. The mighty deeds of Egyptian conquerors, the imperial splendors of Persian dynasties, these were but miniature gems that gilded the corridors and archways in the propylaa of ancient civilization; and on the other side, the brilliancy of

the Cæsars was not that of an original sun in the heavens, since, in one half of their course, they did but reflect the sunset glories of Greece, and, in the other, the rising glories of Christianity. From Macedonia, then, in the North, southward to the sea, and from the heroic age to the Battle of Pydna, (168 B. C.,) extended, in space and time, the original and peculiar splendors of antiquity.

But two of the Hellenic States were consecrated to a special office of glory. These two were Athens and Sparta; and the sublime mission which it was allotted them to fulfil in history was this, that they, within limited boundaries, should concentrate all ante- Christian excellence, that these two States, opposite in their whole character, should, through the conflict between their antagonistic elements, test the strength and worthiness of ante-Christian principles. Precisely in the same relation to Christendom stands America, with her two opposite types of civilization arrayed against each other in mortal conflict. Here must be tested the merits of modern civilization, just as in Peloponnesus and Attica were tested those of the old; here, too, must be tested the strength even of Christianity as a practical power in the political world. Where Ionic and Doric Greece stood twenty-three centuries ago, stand today the Northern and Southern sections of this country; they hold between them, as did their Hellenic prototypes, the heritage of laborious ages, and to their eyes alone have the slowly growing fruits of time seemed ready, from very ripeness, to fall into the lap of man. In either case, Hellenic or American, we look upon generations totally different in circumstance from those which came before them, generations, freed not only from the despotic tutelage of Nature, (from whom they exact tribute, instead of, as formerly, paying it to her,) but also from the still more galling tutelage of ignorance and of the social necessities