hat time are far more wonderful than any ascribed
to the wand of the magician. Nations have come and gone, and the land of
the Pharaohs has become an inheritance for strangers; new sciences have
enriched human life, and the fair structure of modern civilization has
arisen on the ruins of the past. Many centuries, with their burden
of human hopes and fears, have sped away into the past, since
"Hundred-gated Thebes" sheltered her teeming population, where now are
but a mournful group of ruins. Yet to-day, far below the remorseless
sands of her desert, we find the rude flint-flakes that require us to
carry back the time of man's first appearance in Egypt to a past so
remote that her stately ruins become a thing of yesterday in comparison
to them.

In the New World, mysterious mounds and gigantic earth-works arrest our
attention. Here we find deserted mines, and there we can trace the sites
of ancient camps and fortifications. The Indians of the prairies seem
to be intruders on a fairer civilization. We find here evidences of a
teeming population. In the presence of their imposing ruins, we can not
think that nomadic savages built them. They give evidences rather of a
people having fixed habitations and seem to imply the possession of a
higher civilization than that of the Indians. These questions demand
solution; but how shall we solve the problem? Save here and there a
deserted camp, or a burial mound, containing perhaps articles of use or
adornment, all traces have vanished. Their earth-works and mounds are
being rapidly leveled by the plow of modern times, and the scholar of
the future can only learn from books of their mysterious builders. In
Mexico, and farther south, we find the ruins of great cities. To the
student of antiquity, these far surpass in interest the ruined cities
of the Nile or Euphrates valley. Babylon of old, with its walls, towers,
and pleasure resorts, was indeed wonderful. In our own land cities, if
not as ancient, yet fallen in more picturesque ruin, reward the labors
of the explorer. Uxmal, Copan, and Palenque, invite our attention. Here
are hieroglyphics in abundance, but no Rosetta Stone supplies the key by
whose aid a Champollion can unravel the mystery.

The luxuriant vegetative growth of the tropics, with its fierce storms,
is every year hastening the obliteration of these ruins, and we must
improve the time well, if we would learn from them what they have to say
of the past.

The isles o