pronounced the following judgment upon his theory:--'If the developments
which remain to be given to us suffice to gain the votes of the learned,
and induce them to adopt this theory as demonstrated truth, M.L. Petit
Radel may flatter himself with having made in history a discovery truly
worthy to occupy a place in the progress of human genius.'"

Thus the very time in which a living historian of England has chosen to
inflict an impotent blow, from the leaden sceptre of Johnsonian
criticism, upon all facts which claim an existence anterior to the
invention of books, appears pregnant with a discovery of a method of
investigating the most remote eras, which presupposes an inherent spirit
of fallacy and falsehood in all written records of their existence.

About three hundred years after the era of the Olympiads, the first date
of authentic history, Herodotus astonished his countrymen by the
writings he brought forth. Who kept the records out of which his work
was elaborated ere he was ready to stamp the facts with the only seal
which our modern historians will acknowledge or allow? Tradition
doubtless was his guide, which the learned themselves complain of as the
source of what they term his errors and his fables. But the voice of
tradition has often reinstated his claims to our belief, where it had
been suspended either by ignorance or pretensions to superior knowledge.
A modern traveller found, in one of the isles of the Grecian
Archipelago, undoubted vestiges of a state of society similar to that of
the Amazons. The order of the sexes was wholly inverted. The wife ruled
the husband, and his and her kindred, with uncontrolled and unsparing
rigour, sanctioned and even commanded by the laws. Yet the very
existence of any such people as the Amazons of ancient history has not
only been questioned, but denied. Learning has proved it to be
impossible.