CHAP. xix, 23. O that even now my words were recorded! That they were sculptured for perpetuity in a rock. Here we have first simple writing, probably on the leaf or bark of a tree,-secondly, engraving on a wooden tablet,-thirdly, a more permanent record on a metallic plate, and finally the enduring sculpture on everlasting rock. This appears to be not only a climax of duration, but also of invention. It is not probable that the first attempts at written records should have been made on the hardest substance, and we may very legitimately infer that wherever inscribed rocks are found, there must also have been other less difficult and costly modes of keeping public and private records. It is unnecessary to cumber this subject with any investigation into the origin of alphabetic writing, a subject which Dr. Wall has recently pursued with great learning and sagacity. Indeed he has established the exceeding probability, if not the absolute certainty of the Book of Job having been originally written in hieroglyphics, and it is sufficiently obvious that the patriarch's exclamation is just as applicable to pictorial or hieroglyphic writing, as to alphabetical. We shall shew that the aborigines of Ohio had some mode of recording events, but we do not possess sufficient data for determining the nature or kind of writing which they possessed. Captain Carver, who travelled into the interior of North America in the middle of the last century, informs us, "After leaving Lake Pepin, in ten days I arrived at the Falls of St. Anthony (lat. 44° 50'): about thirty miles below them is a remarkable cave, with a lake in it. I found in this cave many Indian hieroglyphics which appeared very ancient, they were covered with moss. They were cut in a rude manner, upon the inside of walls of soft stone.”* Humboldt adds, "Amid the extensive plains of Upper Canada, in Florida, and in the deserts bordered by the Orenois, the Cassiquiare, and the Guainia, dykes of a considerable length, weapons of brass, and sculptured stones, are indications that those very countries have formerly been inhabited by industrious nations, which are now traversed only by tribes of savage hunters."+ In another place the same intelligent traveller adds, "The Agteck hatchet, made of feld-spar, passing into the real jade of M. de Saussure, is loaded with hieroglyphics. I am indebted for it to Don Manuel del Roi, of Mexico, and it is in the king's cabinet at Berlin. "The Mexicans and Peruvians made use of stone hatchets when copper and brass were very common among them. Notwithstanding long and frequent excursions in the Cordilleras of both Americas, we were never able to discover a rock of jade; and this rock being so scarce, the more are we surprised at the immense quantity of jade hatchets which are found on digging in the plains formerly inhabited, from the Ohio to the mountains of Chili."+ Four drawings of the inscribed stone on the Taunton river, were published by Mr. Lort in the third volume of the Archæologia, or Memoirs of the London Anti Carver's Travels, p. 64. + Humboldt, vol. i. p. 25. quarian Society. The objects represented are rude figures in outline, and appear as if they were the transition between pictorial representations and hieroglyphics. There are engraved rocks at Dighton, in Narrajanset bay, not far from the monument described by Mr. Lort, but the engravings of it published by the Anglo-Americans are so inconsistent with each other, that it is difficult to recognise them as copies of the same original. There are no engraved rocks in the plains of Ohio, for the best of all possible reasons, that no rocks exist in the prairies,-inscribed hatchets and plates are found in the tombs. We have thus shewn that there is abundant evidence to prove that the land, which on its first discovery was found peopled by one of the wildest races of savage hunters, had at some former period been possessed by a nation who have left proofs of their civilization in their fortresses, camps, warlike and domestic implements, and in arts, the exercise of which required a high degree of refinement. CHAPTER XII. FURTHER EVIDENCES OF LOST CIVILIZATION. "WHEN I returned from Asia to assume the proconsular government of Achaia, as my galley sailed slowly up the Saronic gulf, I began to cast a curious gaze upon the surrounding regions. Behind me lay Ægina, before me, Megara, on my right hand the Piræus, on my left Corinth; cities which, in times gone by, were the brilliant abodes of opulence and power, but now lay prostrate beneath my eye, in the sorrowful desolation of their present abandonment. The scene came over my spirit with a train of sad, but high-purposed reflections. What? said I,-shall we, feeble creatures of the dust, who by the very tenure of life are only born to die,-shall we repine at the decrees of destiny, or impeach the justice of the immortal gods, if one of us do but perish by disease or violence, when here, in these narrow limits, lie the scattered and unsightly ruins of so many of the noblest among the cities of Greece?— Wilt thou not chasten the murmuring spirit within thee, and in sight of these fallen monuments of the wise and great and glorious of past generations, remember that thou also art but man?"* These are the words of Servius Sulpicius, addressed to his friend Cicero, who was sinking under the accu * Cicero's Letters. mulated weight of severe private loss and portentous public calamity. The great orator and statesman was weeping over the tomb of his daughter Tulliola-the young, the beautiful, the blest-the treasury in which a father's fondest affections were garnered-the fairest flower among the lovely ones of Latium-the youthful model unanimously recommended for imitation to the wives of Rome! The flower faded before its bloom was unfolded-Tulliola was arrested by premature disease in the very outset of her bright career— -"her sun went down while it was yet day;" the doom of early death was pronounced upon her; or, according to the touching superstitions of the ancients, embodied in harmonious verse by a Christian poet,* she received the choicest boon which the gods reserve for their special favourites, an early death. The patriot suffered not less severely than the father; the blood of the best and boldest of the Roman warriors had been poured out like water on the plains of Pharsalia;-hearts that would have dared, and hands that would have achieved, the conquest of a world, were now dull clods of senseless clay. The conscript fathers, the imperial senators, on whose debates the fate of millions had been suspended, had either fallen in the civil contest, or were wandering about in strange lands, Weep not for those whom the veil of the tomb, In life's happy morning hath hid from our eyes, |