188 
or tribe. The men, in short, who combined together to build 
Babel, are supposed to be dispersed in different directions in 
the richest virgin countries of the earth, and the resu 
the sudden erection of magnificent temples, pyramids palaces, 
and cities. In confirmation of this view, we have the actua 
remains of antiquity, which puzzle or excite the admiration o 
our modern architects, engineers, and mathematicians, as to 
how some of those ancient works were accomplished; and yet, 
according to all trustworthy chronology, they were execute 
about thf period we speak of. To enable us to ^ ^ 
better, extraordinary as it may appear, I cannot do better than 
quote from a newspaper paragraph of recent date. .We ca 
only properly judge of the past by a wise consideration of the 
present/or understand what our predecessors upon earth may 
have done, by considering what men do now i 111 
In The Times, then, of 28th June last will be found the fol- 
lowing pregnant words in an article relating to the Ameiica 
iron-dad tfrret-ship Miantonomoh To -y that the Arne; 
ricans are a great people is but to repeat a um\ - 7 
ledged aphorism. They build a city, launch a fleet or set an 
army in the field, in about the same space of time it would 
occupy us in this grand old but slow-moving country, to dis- 
cuss^the preliminaries.” — Let us consider this The capital 
of the United States of America is not yet one hundred years 
old; and there, as also in Australia, we see what an intel - 
gent and civilized community of emigrants can do m a very 
few years ; and that too, remember m our commercial times, 
when not under the rule of absolute kings, or chiefs of castes, 
like those who in former times bestowed their energi J 
upon works that would redound to their pride and glory It 
we also merely consider the changes m the cities of London 
or Paris within a hundred or even fifty years, we oug 
have no difficulty in realizing how much could be done m 
Egypt, India, Assyria, Etruria, Greece and Borne, in some 
hundreds of years, granting that three or four thousand years 
ago men were intelligent and civilized, and not degiaded. 
s?va“s In America also, we find already, in the course of 
one or two generations such a change in the very physique of 
a peopCas S enables us, within our own experience, to see how 
new races would come to be developed out of an originally 
common stock. 
[With these -hints for reflection, I must now pass ' 
glance at the opinions of those who, notwithstanding q ia 
history and archseology attest, have come to conclusions dia 
metrically opposed to what is bere advance * 
