deduction from facts which tradition has first collected? When we
consider in whose hands learning has been, almost ever since its
creation; the uses which have been made of it by priests and
politicians; by poets, orators, and flatterers; by controversialists and
designing historians;--how commonly has it been perverted to abuse the
very senses of mankind, and to give a bias to their thoughts and
feelings, only to mislead and to betray! Let the evidence be well
compared, and a view taken of the respective amounts of doubt and
certainty which appertain to human history as it appears in written
records; and it will be seen that, to verify any given fact, so as to
prevent the possibility of doubt, we must throw aside our reverence for
the scholar's pen and the midnight lamp, which seem, like the faculty of
speech, only given to men, as the witty Frenchman observed, "to conceal
their thoughts." This comparative process is precisely what has been
adopted by M.L. Petit Radel in his new theory upon the origin of Greece.
"Not satisfied with the mythological equivocation and contradictory
statements which till now have perplexed the question, after a residence
of ten years this learned man returns with a new theory, which would
destroy all our received ideas, and carry the civilisation and cradle of
the Greeks much beyond the time and place that have till now been
supposed. It is their very architecture that M. Petit Radel
interrogates, and its passive testimony serves as a basis to his system.
He has visited, compared, and meditated on the unequivocal vestiges of
more than one hundred and fifty antique citadels, altogether neglected
by the Greek and Roman authors. Their form and construction serve him,
with the aid of ingenious reasoning, to prove that Greece was civilised
a long time before the arrival of the Egyptian colonies. He does not
despair of tracing back the descent of the Greeks to the Hyperborean
nations, always by the analogy of their structures, which, by a singular
identity, are found also among the Phoenicians. The Institute have