and tantalized by a richness that made the task of selection an impossible one, have been forced to relinquish the prize and come away with empty hands.  If there be, in the compass of what the author calls “these volumes,”—­though to us, perhaps from inability to distinguish between unity and duality, his work appears to be comprised in a single tome,—­a sentence decently constructed, a foreign name correctly spelt, a punctuation-mark rightly placed, a fact clearly and accurately stated, or an argument that is not capable of an easy reduction to the absurd, we have not been so unfortunate as to discover it.  Mr. Wilson is a man who, to use Carlyle’s favorite expression, has “swallowed all formulas.”  The principles that have generally been held to govern the use of language appear to him mere arbitrary rules, invented by the “sevenfold censorship” and the Spanish Inquisition, for the purpose of preventing the free communication of ideas.  All such trammels he rejects; and, accordingly, we have to thank him, so far as mere style is concerned, for an uninterrupted flow of pleasure in the perusal of his book, adorned as it is with “graces” that are very far indeed “beyond the reach of Art.”

We come now to those important questions which Mr. Wilson was not, indeed, the first to agitate, but which he has awakened from their profound slumbers in the bosom of the Hon. Lewis Cass and the pages of the “North American Review.”  We are not to be tempted into writing another “New History of the Conquest of Mexico”; but we shall endeavor to state with clearness those points on which the world has had the temerity to differ from the “high authorities” we have named.  It has been, then, commonly asserted, and is, we fear, by the great mass of our readers still superstitiously believed, that, at the time of the discovery of this continent, there existed, in certain portions of it, nations not wholly barbarous, and yet not civilized, according to our notions of that term,—­nations which had regular governments and systems of polity, many correct notions in regard to morals, and some acquaintance with Art and with the refinements of life,—­but which were yet, in a great measure, ignorant of the true principles of science, little skilled in mechanics, and addicted to the practice of idolatrous rites.  This assertion would seem to have some prima-facie evidence in its favor.  The regions in which these nations are said to have existed lie within the tropics; and it is a well-established principle, that a genial climate, a fertile soil, the consequent facilities for obtaining a subsistence, and the stimulus thus given to the increase of population, are the first elements of an advance from a savage to a civilized state, of the abandonment of rude freedom and nomadic habits, and of the development of a regular social system.  This principle is clearly set forth and elaborately illustrated by Mr. Buckle; and we the more readily refer to this author, because he stands