406 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



asleep for a single night. Everywhere the traveller of to-day 

 finds the life of the past. He sees the patriarchal customs of by- 

 gone centuries, the shepherd's tents and the flocks on the hillsides, 

 the crowd of travellers hurrying within the city walls at sunset, 

 and the scribe with his ancient ink-horn lingering near the city 

 gate. At the wayside well he finds women filling their water 

 pitchers, and thinks of the marvellous story in the Gospel. He 

 listens to the same minstrelsy that charmed the ear of David, and 

 hears again the love songs that won the hearts of the ancient 

 Jewish maidens. The patient camel kneels every morning to 

 receive his burden, and at nightfall the hoary caravansari receives 

 its dusty travellers, just as in the days of Abraham. 



Such is the work which climate has wrought with a purely 

 homogenous stream of population, taking the whole mass, alive 

 with the freshness and vigor of j^outh, breaking it up into frag- 

 ments, bringing each individual fragment into accordant harmony 

 with its own conditions, and then through the agency of its 

 secondary influences stereotyping the whole heterogenous mass, 

 so completely that centuries have made no change in the cut of a 

 garment or the make of a wagon. What has been may be, and 

 under like circumstances these scenes may all be repeated within 

 the borders of our own country. 



Dr. Draper, in speaking of climate, says : "In our Pacific region 

 there is an American Arabia, Palestine and Tartary. For millions 

 of square miles the aspect of the country is altogether Asiatic, and 

 then on the coast it abruptly approximates Europe. Europe and 

 Asia are here pressed into contact. Man in these varied abodes 

 will undergo modifications, and the ideas of the old world will 

 reappear in the new. The arts of Eastern life, the picturesque 

 Orientalism of Arabia, will be reproduced in our interior* sandy 

 desert, the love songs of Persia in the dells and glades of Sonora, 

 and the religious aspirations of Palestine in the similar scenery of 

 New Mexico." This of course is under the supposition that no 

 greater disturbing force should ever agitate these futui-e popula- 

 tions than have come upon those of Asia. 



Egypt is another of nature's workshops that demands a moment's 

 attention. This country was hoary and venerable with the blight 

 of ages, when first historically known to the rest of the world. 

 "The monumental achievements of its ancient kings were already 

 five hundred years old, when the southern cross sank below the 

 horizon of the Baltic, and the Pole Star itself was a new comer to 



