of the oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of light prevailed then as now.  Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.  The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.  There was but the sun and the eye from the first.  The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.

If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance, still reflecting some of their original splendor, like the fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun; reaching into the latest summer day, and allying this hour to the morning of creation; as the poet sings:—­

     “Fragments of the lofty strain
       Float down the tide of years,
     As buoyant on the stormy main
       A parted wreck appears.”

These are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented.  Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.  We will not be confined by historical, even geological periods which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human affairs.  If we rise above this wisdom for the day, we shall expect that this morning of the race, in which it has been supplied with the simplest necessaries, with corn, and wine, and honey, and oil, and fire, and articulate speech, and agricultural and other arts, reared up by degrees from the condition of ants to men, will be succeeded by a day of equally progressive splendor; that, in the lapse of the divine periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist to elevate the race as much above its present condition.

But we do not know much about it.

Thus did one voyageur waking dream, while his companion slumbered on the bank.  Suddenly a boatman’s horn was heard echoing from shore to shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer’s wife with whom he was to take his dinner, though in that place only muskrats and kingfishers seemed to hear.  The current of our reflections and our slumbers being thus disturbed, we weighed anchor once more.

As we proceeded on our way in the afternoon, the western bank became lower, or receded farther from the channel in some places, leaving a few trees only to fringe the water’s edge; while the eastern rose abruptly here and there into wooded hills fifty or sixty feet high.  The bass, Tilia Americana, also called the lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors.  The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman’s matting,