annual overflow. In those favoured regions agriculture involves little toil, and the harvest ripens almost spontaneously for the reaper's sickle. There, also, flocks and herds were tended and trained for the use of man; and, in the pastoral life of their earliest communities, the herdsmen watched their flocks under the mild beaming stars, and acquired an intelligent familiarity with the constellations, and the planets that wander through the spangled dome of night. In the infancy of our race, men studied the stars, bringing to the aid of their human sympathies the fancies of the astrologer, to fill the void which their imperfect science failed to satisfy. The Chaldean shepherds, who had never travelled beyond the central plain of Asia, where in fancy we recognise the cradle of the human race, began the work of solving the mystery of the heavens; and what the Scottish shepherdastronomer of the eighteenth century, James Ferguson, accomplished, proves what lay in their "O honoured shepherd of our later days, power. Thee from the flocks, while thy untutored soul, Through all the splendid labyrinths of heaven, It was impossible that intelligent man could look forth, night after night, on the constellations, as they varied their place with the change from twilight to the dawn, and from moon to moon, and on the planets that moved in timely courses amid the twinkling stars, without discovering some of their relations to the seasons of the revolving year. But amid the same scenes of mild pastoral life, empires and populous cities first arose; forms of worship, and periodical festivals and sacrifices, marked the annual return of the seasons, when the firstlings of the flock, and the first-fruits of the harvest-home, were 1 Eudosia, a Poem on the Universe, by Capel Lofft. offered by priests on national altars. The herdsman and the tiller of the soil traced to the warm beams of the bright god of day the sources of fertility in flock and field. They beheld the sun when it shined, and the moon walking in brightness, and their heart was secretly enticed, and their mouth kissed the hand.1 Alike in the tropical seats of primitive Asiatic empire, in the African Nile-Valley, and on the plateaus of the Andes, the early astronomers became Sabians, and worshipped the hosts of heaven, while striving to solve their mysterious relations to the earth. But if we follow them in their first division of solar time; and conceive of an annual festival, with sacrifices of the firstlings of the flock, such as we recognise in the most ancient religious rites, with a calendar founded on a year of 365 days: only a very few generations, at most, could pass away, before altogether irreconcilable and ever-increasing discrepancies would occur between the appointed festival and the actual season with which it was originally designed to harmonize. The lambs would be wanting for the burntoffering; the festival of harvesting would return while the wheat was still green in the ear, or the bright tassel of the maize was unformed; and the incensed god would be assumed to look down on his worshippers with wrath, and tardily to withhold the increase of their flocks and the yield of their early seed-time, until the calendar was readjusted, and the sacred and solar years were restored to harmony. Here, also, as we retrace our way, and seek to follow up the stream of time, the way-marks are no less continuous and definite. Names memorable among the intellectual leaders of the human race, stand out as symbols of the progress of knowledge. Leverrier, Rosse, Herschel, Newton, Huygens, and Galileo; Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Al Batani, and Copernicus; Ptolemy, Hip 1 Job xxxi. 26, 27. parchus, Eratosthenes, Autolycus, and Meton; Manetho, and the elder astronomers of Egypt; Berosus, and the Chaldean astrologists: each mark successively one or more steps of progress, from the dawn of astronomical science on the Assyrian plains, where the first shepherds were abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. Here it is obvious we are dealing with no incomprehensible series of cycles of time. There are, indeed, difficult questions still requiring the illumination which further observation and discovery may be expected to supply; nor have such been evaded in those researches; but the present tendency is greatly to exaggerate such difficulties. The first few steps in the progress thus indicated cannot be reduced to a precise chronology. The needful compass of their duration may be subject of dispute, and the precise number of centuries that shall be allowed for their evolution may vary according to the estimated rate of progress of infantile human reason; but I venture to believe that to many reflecting minds it will appear that, by such a process of inquiry, we do in reality make so near an approach to a beginning in relation to man's intellectual progress, that we can form no uncertain guess as to the duration of the race, and find, in this respect, a welcome evidence of harmony between the disclosures of science and the dictates of Revelation. APPENDIX. APPENDIX A.-Vol. ii. p. 347. QUERIES CIRCULATED BY THE AUTHOR WITH A VIEW TO OBTAIN ACCURATE INFORMATION ON THE RESULTS OF THE ADMIXTURE OF RACES IN THE NEW WORLD. INDIAN HALF-BREEDS. 1. What is the number of the half-breed Indians? and from what tribe, or tribes, are they chiefly or wholly derived by their Indian parentage? 2. In what respects do the half-breed Indians differ from the pure Indians, as to habits of life, courage, strength, increase of numbers, etc.? 3. Do marriages ever take place between an Indian husband and white wife? If so, does the offspring differ in any noticeable degree from that of a white husband and Indian wife? 4. Is any difference discernible in half-breeds descended on the one side from French, and those on one side from British parentage? If so, what is the difference? CIVILIZED INDIAN HALF-BLOOD. 1. What is the number of the settled population, either halfbreed, or more or less of Indian blood? 2. What Indian characteristics, physical and mental, are longest traceable in successive descendants of Indian and white |