overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was which
sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders of your great nation.
That book gave them their instinct of Freedom, tempered by reverence for
Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made them not
only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with
the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice and burnt offering thou wouldst not;
Then said we, Lo, we come. In the volume of the book it is written of
us, that we come to do thy will, O God. Yes, long and fantastic is the
chain of causes and effects, which links you here to the old heroes who
came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold,
that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply
after warmth and life, and food for them and for their flocks, they
wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual kingdom.

And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have
we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. What if the
legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous
physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole
north of Asia, be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the slow and age-
long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea
farther and farther to the northward, and placing between it and the
Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying
animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and
the sun?

What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be
the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled
the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth
and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions,
reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown? Why