bracelets and collars of gold, their mirrors of silver and polished stone, and their finely adjusted silver balances, I suppose the reader to be familiar. The strange thing in their history is that they seem to have also succeeded to an earlier race.

In Tahiti, where the best houses are built of bamboo, is a pyramid about two hundred and forty feet long, about ninety feet broad, and from forty to fifty feet high; the foundation is stated to consist of "rock stones," and the steps of coral, squared with extreme neatness and laid with great ingenuity; in fact, all looks as if it had been made by experienced architects. Yet though some of the blocks employed in the construction of this mysterious edifice are of considerable size, they have no marks of the chisel, nor is it at all easy to understand how such vast masses were transported from the seashore to their present restingplace. "It is scarcely possible," says the writer of the article from which this information is taken, “that the present race of islanders, or even their ancestors, could have performed such a task. They are unacquainted with mechanics or the use of iron tools to shape the stones with. From all that could be gleaned from the guide and from other natives afterwards, I felt convinced that they knew nothing of its history, for, as it was beyond their comprehension, they naturally said it was built by the gods, and was as old as the world."

In Tonga Tabù and Easter Island, at Tinian Ualan, and other parts of the Carolina islands, are seen remains of massive stone buildings, the origin and use

*Colburn's United Service Magazine.

of which are equally unknown to the natives, whose ideas of building are bounded to a rude hut. In the easternmost of the Polynesian islands Captain Beechy observed colossal statues or platforms of hewn stone, many of them fallen and mutilated; the natives could gives no account of them at all.

Such are the Archives of Life. They tell us that four great classes of creatures lived before man; and that of all the great needs of life-for them as for man himself-air, food, room on earth and the continuance of race, means of defence and means of prey-not one was wanting at the proper time. If then the probabilities against three stars being drawn into the same sphere are SO enormous, even when such a case depends upon so simple and widespread a power as that of gravity, how immeasurably greater must be the probabilities that six conditions, each of which required vast and complex details, appearing together, could only have been part of a mighty and fully matured plan in which secondary causes must have played a very subordinate part.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FIRST WANDERERS ON EARTH.

"Behold

The first-born brood of chaos and the eld,
The rugged sires of rude unskilful tribes.”

Of all traditions, those which tell of the first peopling of earth by the human kind have ever been the most fondly cherished, and where history rejects the evidence it still preserves the legend, as though it were one of those relics which must not be too rudely dealt with even when they can no longer be believed. The spectacle of the first couple when they were alone in the land, in whatever language it may be told, has still an irresistible charm; and faint as are the outlines of their story, dim as is the ideal picture of their isolation and dangers, their joys and sorrows, their plans for the future and regrets for the past, we never grow weary of dwelling upon the theme. I doubt if, in all the grand narratives of the Bible, any have more stirred the heart than those of the first couple issuing forth from Eden to share in the common lot of humanity, and the re-peopling of the world by the children of Noah; or if amid all the fascinations of eastern travel, there is one which exerts a deeper power over the mind than that of treading in the footsteps of the patriarchs.

The reader has now seen that beyond all question parts of England and Ireland, Scotland, Germany,

Р

Flanders and Switzerland, Denmark and America, had been inhabited by rude savages at a period immensely remote if compared with written history; that in some parts of these countries, at a later period, but still long before even the dawn of authentic tradition, there were people who built forts, erected settlements, and gathered together into cities; that they had some knowledge of the arts and sciences, of commerce and religion; and that they believed in a future state. It is at this later period that I propose to take up one or two threads in the dim and tangled history of the first peopling of our island, and trace them out as far as possible by the light which geology is slowly shedding upon this obscure and distant time.

And first, I may observe, that the wandering nations of the earth from whom our earliest colonists are said to have come have been but very few. I do not speak of those who as they grew in strength possessed themselves of lands near them, settled in them, and amalgamated all into one empire, like the Roman and Assyrian races, but of the genuine wanderers who left their fatherland behind them for ever and wandered forth to people the earth, rolling away past stationary tribes as rivers sweep past the wood and the mountain. They have been so few in number that their names lie strewn over the dark sea of tradition, like the scattered ships of the Trojans over the immense waste of boiling waves. When we have named the jew, phoenician, scythian, and Tuath-dedanaan, and possibly an old peruvian and a mongol race, we have embraced nearly all that tradition, supported by modern research, can really call up to life.

But if they have been few and restless as the mighty rivers, they have almost rivalled them in their power of surviving change and destruction. We see in history that nations have risen, become famous and strong, and yet have perished so utterly that scarcely their names have been preserved from the common grave of all human things, leaving the ruins of their strongholds and their histories heaped before us like the leaves heaped by successive autumns :

"As is the life of the leaves, such is that of mortals; Some leaves the winds strew on earth, others the forest Fruitful brings forth, to bloom in the spring time.

Like these are the races of mortals, this beginning, that ending."

Yet the offspring of some of these wanderers, the jews, for instance, survive and bid fair to survive as long as the most powerful people now on earth.

The cause of their migrations is to me, in the majority of instances, quite incomprehensible; at any rate general principles seem inadequate to explain it. It is not a mere want of the luxuries which foreign countries afford that induces emigration, for the larger proportion of the human kind have almost uniformly resisted the introduction of such things from abroad, till within a very recent period at least. It was not in the present instance the principle of moving forwards where there was the least resistance, which we are told is the mainspring of all human movements, for these early rovers made their way

* “· Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ, τοιήδε καὶ ἀνδρῶν.

Φύλλα τὰ μέν τ' ἄμενος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δε θ' ύλη
Τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ' ἐπιγίγνεται ώρη

Ως ανδρῶν γενεή, ἡ μὲν φύει, ἡ δ ̓ ἀπολήγει.”