development, and relation to other races. Each vocabulary and grammar
of a dead nation is a Nineveh, rich in pictures, inscriptions, and
historical records, uncovering to the patient investigator not merely
the external life and actions of the people, but their deepest internal
life, and their connection with other peoples and times. The little
defaced word, the cast-away root, the antique construction, picked up
by the student among the vestiges of a language, may be a relic fresher
from the past and older than a stone from the Pyramids, or the sculpture
of the Assyrian temple.

In American history, this work of investigation till recently had not
been thoroughly entered upon. Within the last quarter of a century,
Kingsborough and Gallatin and Prescott and Davis and Squier and
Schoolcraft and Müller have each thrown some light over the mysterious
antiquity of our own continent. But of all, a French Abbé, an
ethnologist and a careful investigator,--M. BRASSEUR DE BOURBOURG,--has,
in a history recently published, done the best service to this cause. It
is entitled "Histoire des Nations Civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amérique
Centrale." (Paris, 1857.) M. de Bourbourg spent many years in Central
America, studying the face of the country and the languages of the
Indian tribes, and investigating the ancient picture-writing and the
remains of the wonderful ruins of that region. Probably no stranger has
ever enjoyed better opportunities of reading the ancient manuscripts and
studying the dialects of the Central American races. With these helps he
has prepared a groundwork for the history of the early civilized peoples
of our American continent,--a history, it should be remembered, ending
where Prescott's begins,--reaching back, possibly, as far as the
earliest invasions of the Huns, and one of whose fixed dates is at the
time of the Antonines. He has ventured to lift, at length, the veil from
our mysterious and confused American antiquity. It is an especial merit