A DISSERTATION, ETC. 44} 
nation was the father of the people; and the 
people in one way or another bore his name, 
either as a Patronymic, like the ancient Greeks; 
or, as a prefix to the father’s name, like certain 
clans of the Keltic race. Civilization, that great 
chemist of nations, however has decomposed 
these distinctions, by blending together numer- 
ous communities within the alembic of one vast 
kingdom or empire; and has combined families 
and tribes of people in one homogenous mass of 
population—merely reserving therein such dis- 
tinctions of wealth, station, and merit, from 
families of ancient and modern renown—or of no 
renown at all, but that most honourable renown 
of all—the renown which individuals earn by 
their own unaided exerticns, as harmonize with 
the affinities which civilization loves to promote, 
the affinities for ali that is excellent. But this 
noble synthesis, which civilization has made for 
the benefit of mankind, has occasioned an awful 
jumble in the terms, whereby those relationships 
of primitive life were designated, such as almost 
defies all patient research, and the most extensive 
learning and knowledge to reduce them to aught 
like the appearance of order, according to their 
primordial elements. And no where on the face of 
the earth, has this jumble created such a Babel of 
