work did not forbid to the writer the indulgence of his naive, peculiar
irony of humor, so quiet, yet so profound. My father's book was the
"History of Human Error." It was, therefore, the moral history of
mankind, told with truth and earnestness, yet with an arch, unmalignant
smile. Sometimes, indeed, the smile drew tears. But in all true humor
lies its germ, pathos. Oh! by the goddess Moria, or Folly, but he was
at home in his theme. He viewed man first in the savage state,
preferring in this the positive accounts of voyagers and travellers to
the vague myths of antiquity and the dreams of speculators on our
pristine state. From Australia and Abyssinia he drew pictures of
mortality unadorned, as lively as if he had lived amongst Bushmen and
savages all his life. Then he crossed over the Atlantic, and brought
before you the American Indian, with his noble nature, struggling into
the dawn of civilization, when Friend Penn cheated him out of his
birthright, and the Anglo-Saxon drove him back into darkness. He showed
both analogy and contrast between this specimen of our kind and others
equally apart from the extremes of the savage state and the cultured,--
the Arab in his tent, the Teuton in his forests, the Greenlander in his
boat, the Finn in his reindeer car. Up sprang the rude gods of the
North and the resuscitated Druidism, passing from its earliest
templeless belief into the later corruptions of crommell and idol. Up
sprang, by their side, the Saturn of the Phoenicians, the mystic Budh of
India, the elementary deities of the Pelasgian, the Naith and Serapis of
Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the Bel of Babylon, the winged genii of the
graceful Etruria. How nature and life shaped the religion; how the
religion shaped the manners; how, and by what influences, some tribes
were formed for progress; how others were destined to remain stationary,
or be swallowed up in war and slavery by their brethren,--was told with
a precision clear and strong as the voice of Fate. Not only an
antiquarian and philologist, but an anatomist and philosopher, my father