high in the esteem of Mr. Wilson, who, in order to prove his own especial fitness for historical composition, and the incompetence of all who have preceded him in the attempt, refers to a passage in Buckle, containing an enumeration of the qualifications which he considers indispensable for the historian.  This enumeration includes all the attainments that have ever been in the common possession of the human family.  Mr. Buckle remarks, with indisputable truth, that one historian has lacked some of these qualifications, another historian has lacked others of them.  Mr. Wilson states that “each and every writer” who has preceded him has lacked them all.  Mr. Buckle, by implication, excepts one person, as uniting in himself all the qualifications he demands.  Mr. Wilson thinks he is the exception; but we are quite sure that the exception intended by the author was—­Henry Thomas Buckle.

In the Old World, civilization, as all admit, had its origin in tropical regions.  Across the whole extent of the Eastern Continent, races are found inhabiting the warmer latitudes, which are now, or formerly were, in what is popularly called a semi-civilized condition.  No one, we believe, has ever been foolish enough to account for this fact by supposing that a single people or tribe, having attained some degree of culture, had diffused the germs of knowledge over so large a portion of the globe.  Chinese civilization differs almost as much from that of Hindostan as from that of England or of France.  The Assyrian civilization was indigenous on the borders of the Euphrates, and the Egyptian on the borders of the Nile.  What is remarkable in these and in all the other cases that might be cited is, that in those regions civilization never reached the high point which it has attained in other parts of the world, less favored at the outset; that it exhibited a grotesque union of refined ideas and strangely artificial institutions, with customs, manners, and creeds that seem to the European mind abhorrent and ridiculous; and that, the internal impulse with which it started having been exhausted, it either remained stationary, without further development, or sank into decay, or fell before the hostile attacks of races that had never yielded to its influence.  Now the civilization which is described as having once existed in America exhibits these general characteristics, while it has, like each of the others, its own peculiar traits.  If the discoverers had made a different report, we might have been led to suppose that some such state of things as we have described had previously existed, but had perished before their arrival.