eagle's" a passage which the Chaldee paraphrase renders, "Thou shalt renew thy youth like the eagle in the world to come.”*

The Aztecs, according to Humboldt, felt the curiosity common to man in every stage of civilization, to lift the veil which covers the mysterious past and the more awful future. They sought relief, like the nations of the old continent, from the oppressive idea of eternity by breaking it up into distinct periods or cycles of time, each of several thousand years duration. There were four of these cycles, and, at the end of each, by the agency of one of the elements, the human family was swept from the earth, and the sun blotted from the heavens, to be again rekindled. The Aztec's conception of the origin of man is nobler, and more approximated to that of the Jewish Scriptures, than either the Egyptian or the Hindoo. The following are extracts from a translation of the Popol Vuh, or National Book of the Quiches of Guatemala. How marvelously conformable is the first extract to the story of the earth as recited by geology!

“There was not yet a single man; not an animal; neither birds, nor fishes, nor crabs, nor wood, nor stone, nor ravines, nor herbs, nor forests; only the sky existed. The face of the land was not seen; there was only the silent sea and the sky. There was not yet a body, naught to attach itself to another; naught that balanced itself, naught that made a sound in the sky. There was nothing that stood upright; naught there was but the peaceful sea-the sea silent and solitary in its limits; for there was nothing that was. *** Those who fecundate, those who give being, are upon the waters like a growing light. * * * While they consulted the day broke, and at the moment of dawn man appeared. *** Thus they consulted while the earth

* “In mundo venturo renovabis, sicut aquilæ, juventutem tuam."

grew. Thus, verily, took place the creation as the earth came into being. 'Earth,' said they; and the earth existed. Like a fog, like a cloud was its formation; as huge fishes rise in the water, so rose the mountains; and in a moment the high mountains existed."

The foregoing extract is from the history of the first creation. It can not be necessary to point out the parallels between this passage and the pictures drawn by the classic poets—especially Ovid—nor even to direct attention to the points of coincidence with the Mosaic account of chaos and incipient order. The following passage is from the account of the fourth and last creation:

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Hear, now, when it was first thought of man, and of what man should be formed. At that time spake he who gives life, and he who gives form, the Maker and Moulder, named Tepen, Gucumatz: The day draws near; the work is done; the supporter, the servant is ennobled; he is the son of light, the child of whiteness; man is honored; the race of man is on the earth;' so they spake. ** * Immediately they began to speak of making our first mother and our father. Only of yellow corn and of white corn were their flesh, and the substance of the arms and legs of man. They were called simply beings, formed and fash ioned; they had neither mother nor father; we call them simply men. Woman did not bring them forth, nor were they born of the Builder and Moulder, of Him who fecundates and of Him who gives being. But it was a miracle, an enchantment worked by the Maker and Moulder, by Him who fecundates and Him who gives being.

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Thought was in them; they saw; they looked around; their vision took in all things; they perceived the world; they cast their eyes from the sky to the earth.”

"Then they were asked by the Builder and Moulder, 'What think ye of your being? See ye not? Understand

ye not? Your language, your limbs, are they not good? Look around beneath the heavens; see ye not the mountains and the plains?'

"Then they looked, and saw all that there was beneath the heavens. And they gave thanks to the Maker and the Moulder, saying, 'Truly, twice and three times, thanks! We have being; we have been given a mouth, a face; we speak, we understand, we think, we walk, we feel, and we know that which is far and that which is near. All great things and small on the earth and in the sky do we see. Thanks to thee, O Maker, O Moulder, that we have been created, that we have our being, O our Grandmother, O our Grandfather !'"*

I can not help regarding these sentiments-these reveries of the uninspired and uninstructed intellect of man feeling after the mystery of his origin and the origin of created things as equaling in sublimity the contemplations of a Socrates or a Plato groping by the dim light of reason for an outlook into the future of the soul.

* Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amerique centrale, durant les siècles antérieurs à Christophe Colomb, écrite sur des documents originaux et entièrement inédits, puisés aux anciennes archives des indigènes, par M. l'abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg. 4 forts vol. in -8 raisin svec carte et figures.

CHAPTER XXXV.

SOME THOUGHTS ON PERPETUAL MOTION.

FROM the citations made in the last chapter we dis

cover the existence of a unanimity of belief in the doctrine of periodical catastrophes which is well calculated to excite a spirit of scientific curiosity. It can scarcely be attributed to a mere tradition descending through the ages, and through all the nations between us and the ancient sages upon the banks of the Ganges. Mere tradition is generally circumscribed by the nationality or race among whom it originates. A tradition of a philosophic character must have been subjected to the scrutiny of the philosophers of the nations to which it traveled. If admitted, and maintained, and perpetuated from age to age. among different nations, it must have been because recognized as something more than a tradition. The philosophy of Greece and Rome never harbored a tenet which could only be defended as an Oriental tradition. It must have discovered some rational grounds for the acceptance of this belief, and thus have made it a philosophic principle.

What were the grounds of the naturalization of this Oriental faith we might be unable to determine. Pythagoras, however, explicitly taught that his faith was founded on an observation of geological phenomena; and Lyell thinks that the doctrine in general was based upon records and traditions of deluges and earthquakes, any of which came far short of revolutionizing the face of the earth.

A doctrine so ineradicable, and so spontaneous in every soil, must have rested upon a rational belief. That belief

may be of the nature and authority of an intuitive sentiment. The unanimous consent of mankind to any proposition is to be regarded as the utterance of humanity. That which our common humanity expresses is the expression of the Author of our humanity; it is a kind of revelation, and will be found in all cases to correspond to a reality.

But we are not compelled to refer this doctrine to any spontaneous, and universal, and necessary intimations growing out of the constitution of human nature. Why may not this faith have been a grand generalization reached in common by the philosophic minds of all ages? The facts of Nature have always been patent to all the world. The phenomena upon which we have reared the stupendous structure of the modern sciences were as open to the scrutiny of Thales, and Pythagoras, and Plato as to us. There are scientific grounds for such beliefs; and the ancient sages, though they certainly failed to appreciate the data of science to the same extent as ourselves, may reasonably be supposed to have caught glimpses of majestic inductions. which involved the destruction of terrestrial order, or even the order of the material universe.

We stand now in the presence of those grand and instructive phenomena. On an eminence in the midst of the visible universe, with the multitudinous events of earth and heaven transpiring before our eyes-a universe flooded by the ethereal light of modern science-our intelligence. gifted with the power to penetrate to the core of the earth, or fly beyond the flight of the most erratic comet-or pierce the gloom of a million ages passed-or lift the veil which opens the vista of a million ages to come--and here, in this favored position, we ask ourselves what tides we witness in the flow of terrestrial and cosmical events. It is a sublime query. With boldness, but with humility and reverence, let us seek the answer.