sills," as an aristocratic politician once defined them-the laboring classes, the producers, the working, thinking PEOPLE, upon whose broad shoulders rests the whole burden of the Government; then the State Legislatures; then the Judiciary; then the State Executive; then the two houses of Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States, and the President-the whole forming a pyramid, a miracle of strength, a constitution that defies foreign aggression or intestinal rupture.

None but a nation of freemen can build up so proud a superstructure. Untrammeled, except by lenient and wholesome laws, the citizen is as free as the air he breathes in the choice of his representatives in the town boards, the city councils, the various courts, the legislatures and the higher branches of the government. Herein lies the liberty which gives force to the right of suffrage and adds dignity thereto. Herein lies the justice of our general laws, the wisdom of our legal tribunals, and all the blessings which we, as a people, are permitted to enjoy. The birthright of every man—the right to live, to acquire property, to follow out lawful inclinations, and to pursue happiness—is expressed in the tiny ballot, and gives it a significance before which potentates have trembled and must ever bend.

But liberty alone is not all that is requisite to give a proper expression to the ballot. It must represent intelligence-a due knowledge and understanding of the requirements of the individual, the township, county, state and nation of which the voter is a citi

all men equal in intelligence, all alike governed by prudence and virtue, the office of the judges of election might well be dispensed with. But it is the absence of these virtues that requires the erection and maintenance of all of our reformatory institutions; and until the millennium arrives it will not be safe or judicious to remove the present restrictions from the ballot box.

There is no reason why the right of suffrage should be restricted to color, provided that the intelligence of the individual is sufficient for even a superficial understanding of its value. As for the right of woman to vote, much has been said on both sides of the question. The result of the discussion appears to be that in taking up the ballot our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters will lay aside that delicacy which so emphatically distinguishes their sex, and become, more or less, the victims of that "envy, hatred and malice" which marks the masculine politician. It seems to us that woman's influence upon the opinions of her husband, brothers and sons-undeniably great at all times-ought to satisfy her ambition without compelling her to mount the rostrum in the advocacy of her peculiar ideas or of her favorite candidate. Of course, if woman ever becomes eligible to hold offices of trust and emolument in the government, it is no more than just that her sisters should have a voice in her selection; and in defence of her alleged equality-her right to equal protection with man under the laws, her right to own and dispose of her personal property and income— she is, at least, entitled to a respectful hearing, even if we vote against her. And if negroes and women may acquire full representation in our legislatures, the courts, Congress or the Cabinet, let it never be done by sacrificing the right of suffrage to ignorance or vice, under whatever garb they come to the polling booth.

laid his hand upon old ocean's mane, "Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now." Byron had wandered in poetic revery amongst the vestiges of ancient empires, and sighed to think how the greatest works of human genius dissolve to dust. He had saddened, perhaps, at the thought of his own inevitable fate, and fancied that in the "deep and dark blue ocean" only, could be discerned "the image of eternity." Had Byron learned that the seven hills themselves, on which had sat imperial Rome, were but the vestiges of an older order of things, and that even solid continents have crumbled like the Coliseum, a deeper tinge would have colored his habitual melancholy. Happy had it been for Byron could he have practiced the belief in the existence and eternity of his own spirit which he sometimes confessed; for there is nothing but spirit which bears "the image of eternity."

The "everlasting hills"-the fancied types of solidity and endurance-are but a passing phase in the history of terrestrial matter. The mountain's sullen brow has frowned where quiet vales expand themselves to the morning light, and fields and cities smile where rugged eliffs and abysmal gorges long delayed the advent of a race that had been heralded through the geologic ages.

Even continents have their lifetime. They germinate; they grow; they attain to full expansion and beauty; they fulfill their mission in the economy of matter and of life; the furrows of senes. cence channel their wasted faces, and they return to mud and slime, whence they were born. The very substance of

the solid floors which underlie the soil of American freedom, is but the dust of continents decayed. As modern cities are sometimes built from the ruins of ancient temples on whose sites they stand, so the dwelling place prepared for man by the hand of Nature is but the reconstructed material of a more ancient continent, the work of Nature's "'prentice hand." The vertical thickness of fifty thousand feet of sedimentary strata measures the depth of the rubbish accumulated from mountain cliffs and continental slopes that have been transformed by the wand of time. We sometimes forget that the total volume of our stratified rocks is but an index of the denudations and obliterations that have been wrought. Much calcareous material has, indeed, been yielded by the sea; but the sea first filched it from the land.

The revelation made by every formation which we study, from the bottom to the top of the Paleozoic series, points to the north and northeast as the origin of the stream of sediments that spread over the bottom of the American lagoon which stretched as a broad and shallow ocean from the rising, but yet submarine, slopes of the Alleghanies on the east, to the embryonic ridges of the Rocky Mountains on the west. Northeastward of the present continent have undoubt edly existed supplies of incalculable magnitude, of which but the merest vestiges remain. The geologist leads us to the region north of the great lakes and the St. Lawrence River, and points out the Laurentide Ridge as the nucleus of the eastern portion of our continent. Around its bases has been wrapped layer upon layer of accumulating sediments,

till the ocean has been banished from a broad belt of his ancient dominion. But this, instead of being the real nucleus of the American continent, is but the vestige of that nucleus. How vastly inferior in height and breadth, and especially in northeastward prolongation, to that primordial continent whose crumbling shores and denuded slopes afforded material for the broad sheets of Silurian, Devonian and Carboniferous strata which stretch a thousand miles in every direction! Where lay the dissolving lands which furnished substance for the ponderous Alleghanies? must be that vast areas have disappeared from view. Though we believe, with Dana, that the modern continents were outlined in primeval time, and the ocean still reposes in his ancient bed, we must not be too exact in the enunciation of our faith. The Aleutian Islands, stretching from Alaska across the North Pacific, are but the protruding vertebræ of an eroded ancient ridge which welded the Orient to the Occident. New England, Gaspe, the Labrador elbow these all reach toward the site

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of an obliterated prolongation-a friendly arm of the American continent stretched out to greet the continental arm of Europe extended from the British Archipelago toward America. Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Prince Edward's, Anticosti-these are but the highest summits of that wasted ridge, as Ireland and Great Britain are the relics of the ridge responsive to this upon the European side. The submarine plateau, along whose back creeps the great Atlantic Cable, though sunken ten thousand feet beneath the reach of further denudation, is but the stump of an ancient continent that has been gnawed to the very foundations. It is interesting to reflect that advancing civilization has at last re-established the amicable intercommunication of two continents, which had been embraced, perhaps, in the ordinations of primeval time.

Such are the reminiscences of a wasted continent of which the Laurentide nucleus is but a trace. We stand upon this venerable relic of long-forgotten lands, and the current of time sweeps by, bearing upon its dark bosom the wrecks of other continents born of earthquake and flood in the later ages of terrestrial history. But though we intend to rescue from oblivion the tales inscribed upon these disappearing ruins, thought lingers fondly and reverently and inquiringly around the scorched and beaten brow of this Laurentide Ridge. What was its mother? And where was its birth-place? These ancient granites and thickly-bedded gneisses thrice baked and crystallized by the fiery ordeals through which they have passed-bear, nevertheless, the ineffaceable traces of old ocean's work. Here are the lines of sediment which betray the parentage of these hardened and storm - beaten rocks. Back into another cycle of eternity imagination plunges in search of that more ancient land that was reconstructed in this "primordial" ridge. To say that it did not exist, is to say that old ocean could pile up masonry without a supply of bricks and mortar. In the realm of thought, that earlier land looms up; but its bounds and borders are obscured by the overhanging fogs which haunt the early twilight of time. The skies themselves are strange, and our science gropes for the data which shall fix the latitude and longitude of this undiscovered land. Was it still another pile of rocks reared by the labors of water? Or was it a mass of ancient slag, the first-born products of primeval refrigeration of a molten globe? There was an earliest land-a dome of lava just cooled from the fiery abyss of molten matter -a film of frozen dolerite or porphyry stretched around the fluent globe-a solid floor on which descended from the gathered clouds the waters which formed a sea without a shore.

There must have been a time when the surges were first summoned to their work. To assert, with Hall, that it is idle to dream of such a beginning, because, forsooth, the traces of the morning's work have been obliterated by the operations of mid-day, is to plunge into the fallacies of the too fashionable, nescience philosophy, and to assert that there is no knowledge but that which the senses certify.

We turn now our thoughts down the stream of time, and note the relics of later revolutions. Not for eternity were laid the floors of the Old Red Sandstone strata which once stretched, perhaps, from the Catskills to Massachusetts Bay. Not for eternity were reared the Appalachian summits whose elevation celebrated the close of Paleozoic time. The Catskills are but a pile of horizontal strata, spared by the gigantic denudations which scraped the face of New England to the bone, and washed away a third of the Empire State. The continuation of the Catskill strata is discovered again in Pennsylvania, Western New York, Ohio and Michigan. Who shall undertake to delineate the topography, the drainage, the vegetation, the populations of that ancient New England surface which now lies strewn, perhaps, from the bottom of Long Island Sound to the further shores of Jersey? Who shall write an epic on the fortunes of that mythical forefather land? The summits of the Alleghanies, geologists tell us, have settled down some thousands of feet. Their huge, protruding folds, plaited together in compact array, have been planed down to their innermost core; and from the chips have been produced the lowlands of the south Atlantic borderlike the water-front raised in a modern city by carting down the sand-hills in the rear. The very coal-beds interwoven in their stony structure are but the fossilized swamps of an ancient continental surface that has disappeared- clothed

once by forest trees whose family types have dropped from the ranks of exist ence, and populated by those strange amphibians-half fish, half reptile — which, like the fabled Colossus, bridged the chasm between two dominions.

There was a long and mediæval time in American history of which our records are mostly lost. The coal lands had been finished; the atmosphere had been purged; the Appalachians had been raised, and from their bases stretched westward beyond the destined valley of the Mississippi, an undulating upland but lately redeemed from the dominion of interminable bogs. The western border of this land skirted a mediterranean sea, through which probably the Gulf Stream coursed from the tropics to the frozen ocean. Here was accumulated a soil; here descended genial rains; here flourished tropical plants; and here wound majestic rivers, fed by their hundreds of tributary streams. All traces of this ancient continent have disappeared. Terrestrial animals must have populated the spacious forests; insects uttered their sleepy hum amid the luxuriant foliage of evergreen Voltzias, and sluggish Labyrinthodonts crawled from beneath the shade of perennial Cycads. This ancient home of vegetable and animal life spread over the States of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and Kentucky, and all the region contiguous to these. River channels were dug, whose very locations we seek in vain. Cities and villages and verdant farms now stand upon the sites above which waved a sombre forest whose every trace has been wiped from the face of the continent, while the very soil in which their roots were bedded has been transported to the Gulf of Mexico. Those broad and fertile plains performed their part in the history of terrestrial preparations, and, like the pictures on the lithographer's stone, they have been completely erased, to be suc