of 1832, excited much consternation in the breasts of the timid and superstitious. Some of our readers doubtless remember the fearful apprehensions which its unwelcome appearance aroused. Some predicted that, in crossing the earth's orbit, it would strike our more sober world, and either knock it from its sphere, or deluge it with its superfluous fire! It did neither; but, like a fine, noble ship, it sailed on its course through the "upper deep," heeding our earth no more than our ocean-steamers heed the little nautilus afloat on the same waters. But the great excitement of our century occurred in 1843-the Miller excitement," as it is called. The history of its prophet, Miller, and of its most interesting incidents, are too familiar to the reader to demand a more extended notice. It will not soon be forgotten. Indeed, the waves which it aroused in the great sea of society have not yet wholly calmed away. Occasionally we hear the distant thunder-roar of their dashing, sounding in our ears, like the howl of ocean-billows dying around solitary rocks. The visits of comets, as we have seen, have been the occasion of much of the alarm which has so often disturbed the peace of our world. That of 1456 caused the greatest alarm, perhaps. Even the most enlightened believed that it was "big with the fate" of our globe. Pope Calixtus II., to prepare his people for the approaching Judgment, ordered the Ave Maria to be repeated three times a day, instead of two, as before. To this prayer the following-to meet the coming exigency-was added: "Lord save us from the Devil, the Turk, and the Comet." "Three times a day," says a writer, "these obnoxious personages suffered a regular excommunication." If the Devil let them alone as entirely as did the dreaded comet, it was more than those old Catholics dared to hope, and more than our modern "Know-Nothings will allow themselves to believe. Our Much alarm was caused by the comet of 1680. New England ancestors were greatly excited by its appearance. They held a solemn "Fast" that year, in the old Bay State; and prominent among the reasons assigned by his excellency for appointing the same, was this:"That awful, portentous, blazing star, usually foreboding some calamity to the beholders thereof." 16 We can easily imagine the awe which the early settlers-particularly those of old Dunstable-regarded that boding visitor. All the Indians between the Penobscot and the Hudson, yelling their war-whoop, and brandishing their war-clubs on the skirts of their settlements, could not have excited greater terror. But the unwelcome intruder having sufficiently alarmed its superstitious beholders, plunged its fiery length into the fathomless depths of its native, etherial deep, and disappeared, whilst pæans of thanksgiving for the great deliverance, broke the awful stillness of the "settlement," and startled the savage in his forest home. up Comets were anciently regarded as lawless bodies,giant agents of destruction,-huge leviathans of the " per deep; " now, by their momentum, shattering a planet to fragments; next, spouting a deluge of water upon a guilty world; and, anon, by a brush of their fiery tails, setting some doomed orb ablaze. Little did they dream. that the comets had orbits, and that over their blazing backs were drawn the reins of omnipotent law. Still less did they dream that men would ever be able to define their orbits, determine the times of their revolutions, and predict the period of their appearance in our heavens. But this, man has achieved, and, by the splendid achievement, has afforded another proof of his relation to that Power which upholds these wondrous worlds as they "Wheel unshaken in the void immense," Another important problem has also been solved by man. He has determined how many chances of collision with these comets our earth is exposed to. The French government some years ago called upon its ablest mathematicians to solve this difficult question, and the following is the result of their calculations. In their answer to the government, they say, "We have found that of two hundred and eighty-one millions of chances, there is only one unfavorable, there exists but one which can produce a collision between the two bodies. Admitting then," they continue, "for a moment, that the comets which may 16 Fox's History of Dunstable, p. 44. strike the earth with their nucleuses, would annihilate the whole human race; the danger of death to each individual, resulting from the appearance of an unknown comet, would be exactly equal to the risk he would run, if in an urn there was only one single white ball among a total number of two hundred and eighty-one millions, and that his condemnation to death would be the inevitable consequence of the white ball being produced at the first drawing." 17 Those who have faith in French mathematicians will not feel much alarm whenever a new wanderer in the depths of space makes his debut in our quiet heavens. Its appearance will rather be welcomed, because it will impressively remind the admiring observer of that Infinite One, who shot it from his bow at the creation, and who bends its course so securely among the worlds which he has peopled with intelligent life. This round earth has not finished its mission. As yet it does not tremble with age, but bounds in the buoyancy of youth around its star-encircled orbit. There are no wrinkles on its glorious brow. Its flowers bloom as beautifully, its grass grows as greenly, its forests wave as proudly in the breeze, its winds blow as briskly, its streams dance as merrily, its mountains tower as grandly, and its oceans roll as sublimely, as when the morning stars sang its birth-song. Doubtless the time is coming when it will "Swing blind and blackening in the moonless air." But that time is known only to Him who made the universe, and who upholdeth its sparkling orbs by the "word of his power." Our earth has better days before her, we trust, than any she has yet passed. In obedience to the great law of progress, she is rising from the crude estate of her early time, to that perfection which her Maker made possible. Concerning her future, is the faith and hope so well expressed by a modern poet : "Earth casts off a slough of darkness, an eclipse of hell and sin, 17 Geography of the Heavens, pp. 259, 250. C. H. F. ART. II. The Origin of Civilization. 1. Lectures to Young Men, on the Origin of Civilization. By His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin. London: Nesbit & Company. 1855. 2. A Lecture on the Origin and Development of the first Constituents of Civilization. By Francis Lieber. Columbia, S. C.: J. C. Morgan. 1845. THE traditions of nearly every people existing upon the earth, speak of a distant past, in which innocence and simplicity prevailed; in which a knowledge of certain arts was possessed, which is not now enjoyed; when every human want and desire was satisfied, and man lived in contentment, in happiness, in peace. The legends of some nations embody the same conception clothed in a garb somewhat different; they speak of a paradise which was man's first estate, in which he was guileless and pure, from which he was cast out through transgression. There is a striking unanimity in the voice of universal tradition in thus conceiving of the past. How explain this concurrence? How account for this mode of the mind's regarding? It is indeed true that the human mind everywhere works under certain definite laws. Even the imagination, the visionary faculty, has its mode of creating and conceiving a law, which it obeys among every people, in every stage of culture or of rudeness. Our design here is to inquire into the truth conveyed to us through the ages in this vehicle of tradition. Does universal tradition express pure and unmixed truth, or is there contained in it a portion of error? In approaching the consideration of this subject, we may remark, as preliminary to our essential arguments, that we have, we think, an instance of a similar mode of conceiving, in the aged, which we cannot regard as altogether correct, in which we believe is involved something of error. We refer to that habit of mind, through the influence and operation of which, the aged are led to speak of the period of infancy or of youth as the happiest and best period in life, and are ever reverting to it as such, speaking of each subsequent stage in life as a degeneracy from this earliest and happiest season. It is also through the influence of the same law of the mind, that the old almost invariably magnify the past in their lives, -are in the habit of thinking that the manners, institutions, customs of their youth or prime were surpassing, and that any change or departure from them is evidence of degeneracy. As we have already indicated, we believe that something of error, as also of truth, has been handed down to us through this vehicle of tradition. It shall be our task, preliminary to a notice of the lectures which stand at the head of our writing, to indicate as well as we may these two elements. Meanwhile we approach our subject by different paths, arriving however at the same conclusion. · When we look out upon the world without us, all objects stand before our gaze clothed in the attributes of perfection and beauty. The sun, the moon, the stars, the great vault above us, the sea, the land, all the features of the landscape, all the creatures imbosomed in nature, are parts which are included in a perfect whole, and which go to constitute a perfect unity. All things are for the moment thus poetically conceived of. Every day, from youth to age, the landscape, viewed from a commanding position, presents itself to the sensitive mind, as the perfect fair, the perfect beautiful, as even on the first morning of the Creation. As of the ocean it was said by Byron, "Such as at creation's dawn thou rollest now," and as from creation its beauty has undergone no decay, as also with the entire landscape itself, so is it with that perfect ideal which nature ever suggests to the sensitive mind. We offer no explanation of this fact. We only state the fact. The mind is so made that it attaches perfection and beauty to the external creation. Man, like the other creatures, is imbosomed in nature. He also is poetically conceived of as partaking of her perfection. The perfection of the creation is attached to him. In truth it is not so. Man is created in his lowest estate; he is the most imperfect of all creatures, and when first introduced into the world is the frailest and feeblest. other things come full-rounded and complete from the creating hand of God-nature in her perfect laws, the All |