ctly asserted in our annals, has been met with the ready
scepticism which men so freely use to cover ignorance or indifference.
It has been taken for granted that the dispersion, after the confusion
of tongues at Babel, was the first dispersion of the human race; but it
has been overlooked that, on the lowest computation, a number of
centuries equal, if not exceeding, those of the Christian era, elapsed
between the Creation of man and the Flood; that men had "multiplied
exceedingly upon the earth;" and that the age of stone had already given
place to that of brass and iron, which, no doubt, facilitated commerce
and colonization, even at this early period of the world's history. The
discovery of works of art, of however primitive a character, in the
drifts of France and England, indicates an early colonization. The
rudely-fashioned harpoon of deer's horn found beside the gigantic whale,
in the alluvium of the carse near the base of Dummyat, twenty feet above
the highest tide of the nearest estuary, and the tusk of the mastodon
lying alongside fragments of pottery in a deposit of the peat and sands
of the post-pliocene beds in South Carolina, are by no means solitary
examples. Like the night torch of the gentle Guanahane savage, which
Columbus saw as he gazed wearily from his vessel, looking, even after
sunset, for the long hoped-for shore, and which told him that his desire
was at last consummated, those indications of man, associated with the
gigantic animals of a geological age, of whose antiquity there can be no
question, speak to our hearts strange tales of the long past, and of the
early dispersion and progressive distribution of a race created to
"increase and multiply."

The question of transit has also been raised as a difficulty by those
who doubt our early colonization. But this would seem easily removed. It
is more than probable that, at the period of which we write, Britain, if
not Ireland, formed part of the European continent; but were it not so,
we have proof, even in the present day, that screw propellers and iron
cast vessels are not necessary for safety in distant voyages, since the
present aboriginal vessels of the Pacific will weather a storm in which
a _Great Eastern_ or a _London_ might founder hopelessly.

Let us conclude an apology for our antiquity, if not a proof of it, in
the words of our last poet historian:--

"We believe that henceforth no wise person will be found who will
not a