strange a fact! Not only are we accustomed to speak of the eastern
continents as the Old World, in contradistinction to the great continent
of the west, but to speak also of the world before the Flood as the Old
World, in contradistinction to the post-diluvian world which succeeded
it. And yet equally, if we receive the term in either of its
acceptations, is America an older world still,--an older world than that
of the eastern continents,--an older world, in the fashion and type of
its productions, than the world before the Flood. And when the immigrant
settler takes axe amid the deep backwoods, to lay open for the first
time what he deems a new country, the great trees that fall before
him,--the brushwood that he lops away with a sweep of his tool,--the
unfamiliar herbs which he tramples under foot,--the lazy fish-like
reptile that scarce stirs out of his path as he descends to the
neighboring creek to drink,--the fierce alligator-like tortoise, with
the large limbs and small carpace, that he sees watching among the reeds
for fish and frogs, just as he reaches the water,--and the little
hare-like rodent, without a tail, that he startles by the way,--all
attest, by the antiqueness of the mould in which they are cast, how old
a country the seemingly new one really is,--a country vastly older, in
type at least, than that of the antediluvians and the patriarchs, and
only to be compared with that which flourished on the eastern side of
the Atlantic long ere the appearance of man, and the remains of whose
perished productions we find locked up in the _loess_ of the Rhine, or
amid the lignites of Nassau. America is emphatically the _Old_ World. If
we accept, however, as sound the ingenious logic by which Colton labors
to show, in not inelegant verse, that the _Moderns_ are the true
_Ancients_, we may continue to term it the New World still.

"We that on these late days are thrown
Must be the oldest Ancients known;
The _earliest_ Modern earth hath seen
Was Adam in his apron green.
He lived when young Creation pealed
Her morning hymn o'er flood and field,
Till all her infant offspring came
To that great christening for a name.
And he that would the Ancients know,
Must forward come, not backward go:
The learned lumber of the shelves
Shows nothing older than ourselves.
But who in older times than we
Shall live?--That infant on the knee,--
See sights to us were never shown,
And secrets known to us unknown."