for the antiquarians pen. The traveler has moralized over the
ruins of her past greatness, and many pointed illustrations of
national growth and decay have been drawn from her history.

Here was the seat of an ancient civilization, which was in the
zenith of its power many centuries before Christ. The changes
that have passed over the earth since that time are far more
wonderful than any ascribed to the wand of the magician.
Nations have come and gone, and the land of the Pharaohs has
become an inheritance for strangers; new sciences have enriched
human life, and the fair structure of modern civilization has
arisen on the ruins of the past. Many centuries, with their
burden of human hopes and fears, have sped away into the past,
since "Hundred-gated Thebes" sheltered her teeming population,
where now are but a mournful group of ruins. Yet to-day, far
below the remorseless sands of her desert, we find the rude
flint-flakes that require us to carry back the time of man's
first appearance in Egypt to a past so remote that her stately
ruins become a thing of yesterday in comparison to them.

In the New World, mysterious mounds and gigantic earth-works
arrest our attention. Here we find deserted mines, and there we
can trace the sites of ancient camps and fortifications.
The Indians of the prairies seem to be intruders on a fairer
civilization. We find here evidences of a teeming population.
In the presence of their imposing ruins, we can not think that
nomadic savages built them. They give evidences rather of a
people having fixed habitations and seem to imply the possession
of a higher civilization than that of the Indians.
These questions demand solution; but how shall we solve the