276 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



from its limit of greatest eccentricity ; and though all are familiar 

 with the consequent fact that the glacial epoch, which lias so long 

 made a large part of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable, has passed 

 its climax ; yet it is not universally known that, in some regions, the 

 retreat of glaciers has lately made accessible tracks long covered. 

 Amid moraines and under vast accumulations of detritus, have been 

 found here ruins, there semi-fossilized skeletons, and in some places, 

 even records, which, by a marvellous concurrence of favorable condi- 

 tions, have been so preserved that parts of them remain legible. Just 

 as our automatic quarrying-engines occasionally turn up fossil cephalo- 

 pods, so Httle injured that drawings of them are made with the sepia 

 taken from their own ink-bags ; so here, by a happy chance, there have 

 come down to us, from a long-extinct race of men, those actual secre- 

 tions of their daily life, which furnish coloring-matter for a picture of 

 them. By great perseverance our explorers have discovered the key 

 to their imperfectly-developed language ; and in course of years have 

 been able to put together facts yielding us faint ideas of the strange 

 peoples who lived there during the last preglacial period. 



" A report just issued refers to a time called by these peoples the 

 middle of the nineteenth century of their era ; and it concerns a nation 

 of considerable interest to us the English. Though until now no 

 traces of this ancient nation were known to exist, yet there survived 

 the names of certain great men it produced one a poet whose range 

 of imagination and depth of insight are said to have exceeded those of 

 all who went before him ; the other, a man of science, of whom, pro- 

 found as we may suppose in many other respects, we know definitely 

 this, that to all nations then living, and that have since lived, he 

 taught how the Universe is balanced. What kind of people the Eng- 

 lish were, and what kind of civilization they had, have thus always 

 been questions exciting curiosity. The facts disclosed by this report 

 are scarcely of the kind anticipated. Search was first made for traces 

 of these great men, who, it was supposed, would be conspicuously com- 

 memorated. Little was found, however. It did, indeed, appear that 

 the last of them, who revealed to mankind the constitution of the heav- 

 ens, had received a name of honor like that which they gave to a suc- 

 cessful trader who presented an address to their monarch ; and besides 

 a tree planted in his memory, a small statue to their great poet had 

 been put up in one of their temples, where, however, it was almost lost 

 among the many and large monuments to their fighting chiefs. Not 

 that commemorative structures of magnitude were never erected by 

 the English. Our explorers discovered traces of a gigantic one, in 

 which, apparently, persons of distinction and deputies from all nations 

 were made to take part in honoring some being man he can scarcely 

 have been. For it is difficult to conceive that any man could have had 

 a worth transcendent enough to draw from them such extreme hom- 

 age, when they thought so little of those by whom their name as a race 



